‘Dampfschifffahrt!’ shouted my husband as though it were funny. I had been saying how strange it was that explosive gas in a coal mine should be called firedamp, since damp things burn with difficulty. Nevertheless, my husband was on to something, for the German Dampf, steam, is related to English damp.
Damp in English originally meant ‘a noxious exhalation’. Caxton used it in the 15th century when writing of a prophecy of Merlin about a goat breathing from its nostrils a ‘damp’ that would betoken hunger. By the 17th century various kinds of damp were feared in mines, fulminating damp or firedamp, which caught fire from the miners’ candles, and choke damp, which suffocated them.
To damp, then, could be to ‘stifle’ someone, like ‘the vapours of a replete stomach rising up and damping the braine’ mentioned by a writer in the 1630s. A fire or furnace could be damped down by covering it with ashes or small bits of coal: not making it wet but stopping air being drawn into it.
Today we expect damp to imply wetness, a restricted sense established in the 18th century, and so we assume the figure of speech damp down is suited to a wet blanket. I was all the more surprised to see a newspaper talking of speculation that the Vatican had ‘tamped down’.
This looked like a mere mistake. Tamp belongs to a different field of meaning, to do with ramming home an explosive charge – hardly what the Vatican wanted to do with speculation. But since the second world war, to tamp down has acquired in America the meaning of ‘constricting’ or ‘subduing by force’.
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