Lobster Sauce and Soft Pedal

News flash! “Lobster sauce” is so called not because it contains lobster—it doesn’t—but because it goes well with lobster. So I was wondering whether soft pedal is so called because it makes a sound that goes well with soft playing.

I don’t know if soft pedal makes the sound softer or not; the important thing is the change in tone quality, like a mute on a violin, and that, instead of two modalities of using it—playing soft with the pedal, unsoft without it—there are four: soft with pedal, soft without pedal, unsoft with pedal, unsoft without. The first and last are the usual ones; the middle two open up new tonal realms.