can something be both dusty and damp?

[Piscean]

Ask the gardening shoes that I used to leave in my garden shed in the winter months. They managed it.

[emsr2d2]

Because damp isn't the same as wet. Sometimes something damp might just feel cold to the touch. It doesn't have to be wet enough to actually mix with dust to make a sort of mushy mess (it would never be called "mud").

[probus]

A google search returns several results for each of "damp and dusty" and "dusty and damp". Oddly enough, the Corpus of Contemporary American English seems to contain neither. Perhaps I'm using the CoCA wrong.

[emsr2d2]

I was surprised that CoCA didn't come up with anything. Ngram, however, gives many hits for "damp and dusty" but nowhere near as many for "dusty and damp".

However, bear in mind that certain words not appearing many times in a string on either CoCA or Ngram doesn't mean they don't provide a grammatical sentence when used. Imagine that I have a shiny small car that's red and green with purple spots. It's perfectly reasonable for me to say "I've got a small, shiny, red and green and purple-spotted car". If you put "small, shiny, red and green and purple-spotted" into CoCA, I doubt you'd get any results at all. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with my sentence.

[Piscean]

Because damp isn't the same as wet. Sometimes something damp might just feel cold to the touch. .

It doesn't even need to be particularly cold but it certainly doesn't have to feel wet.,.

When I take washing from my spin drier, it is too damp to put away, but I could squeeze and wring it with might and main and fail to extract a single drop of water.