I'm a very, very bad harpist, but I don't think that would work very well, McGrath. What's more it'd be totally unnecessary. You can only damp 4 strings that way, which won't make for a very large chord on the undamped strings, unless you want some serious disharmony! You can pluck, either simultaneous or arpeggiated, up to 8, so why bother?

My guess would be that the perfectly good word for "plucked" he refers to perhaps differentiates between a damped & non-damped stroke or, more likely, refers to a plectrum style instrument, such as a plucked psaltery. Is this 'plucked' ever used in context with the harp, I wonder?