this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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Risa
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Come on'n get your jamaharon on! There are no real rules—just don't break the weather control network.
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On DS9, they usually used the correct term inertial dampers. Whereas on TNG they couldn't keep the two terms straight.
Ha, I never actually paid attention to that. I think the fact that I'm not a native English speaker could be why "dampener" never sounded weird to me.
Although looks like the Oxford English Dictionary says both have the meaning "thing or person that has a restraining or subduing effect", so I guess they'd both be correct in that sense?
Through idiomatic usage, dampener has taken the same meaning as damper, but as my dynamics professor was fond of saying, one of them terms means to slow motion, the other means to get something wet.
Heh, unfortunately there's no fighting linguistic evolution. I'm a descriptivist so I can happily skip those battles – ie. I think a language is defined by a description of how it's used, compared to prescriptivists who think that eg. grammars and vocabularies prescribe how a language should be used.
The inertial dampeners are only used when someone puts their sonic shower in "wet" mode.