I will gladly die on this hill.

Obviously! Well done. Your definition is delusional and at odds with science and common language use, yet you won’t back down. That takes commitment. It also has me questioning whether you believe in light outside human perception (since it’s also measured as a wave). You are the embodiment of this fun thread! And I genuinely enjoy thinking about both positions.

But I think I’ll stick with the Wikipedia and dictionary editors, and the likes of Britannica which states:

Sound, a mechanical disturbance from a state of equilibrium that propagates through an elastic material medium. A purely subjective definition of sound is also possible, as that which is perceived by the ear, but such a definition is not particularly illuminating and is unduly restrictive, for it is useful to speak of sounds that cannot be heard by the human ear, such as those that are produced by dog whistles or by sonar equipment.

I appreciate your hill. But several sources disagree with you.

Wikipedia: “In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid.”

Oxford: “1. vibrations that travel through the air or another medium and can be heard when they reach a person’s or animal’s ear.”

Webster: “1.c: mechanical radiant energy that is transmitted by longitudinal pressure waves in a material medium (such as air) and is the objective cause of hearing”

Cambridge: “something that you can hear or that can be heard”

These don’t seem to require the ear for the vibrations to be sounds in and of themselves. Only that it would be detectable by an ear if an ear were present.

Upon what do you base your assertion that it is the hearing of the thing that is the most essential requirement? (And given the thread I think it’s perfectly reasonably for the answer to be something like “because it’s my hill dammit!”)

Neat. It has a wikipedia article as well.

It makes sense. But as a US speaker it just makes me want to stick to my guns and generalize our second syllable stress on these units. I’m team kilogram now. And centimeter.

Found a new hill!

It’s amazing that they can measure the speed of sound at all given this. They must need to line up a bunch of eardrums.

That’s my take too. Short for “this requires you to follow a steep learning curve, even if it is not easy to do so.”

Ha! Well I was just having a laugh. Expecting that you would prefer “you should damp your expectations” and that my construction should mean “make your expectations wet.” And it turns out dampen is ambiguous. It means both moisten and dull, deaden, make weak.

Not only that, but most every form carries both meanings, and the “weaken” sense for the word damp predates the “humid” sense. Because the noun came first and it was specific to suffocating fumes in a mine that would extinguish candles, and people.

So my take now is that dampening means both “making weak” and “humidifying, moistening.” Only damping is specific to motion/energy. And I can’t recall encountering anyone using damping to mean “making wet.”

That’s a great point. Water heaters heat hot water much more often than cold water. Maintaining the already elevated temperature.

You should probably dampen your expectations on this one.

I tasted the rainbow 🌈