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Comment by zdragnar | Hacker News Reader

No, the alternative would be to make up some latin sounding words for planets, dwarf planets, etc. and leave the vulgar planet alone to the standard 9 that we all know are planets.

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No that would be an argument to return to the original definition of planets (highly visible celestial objects that migrate across the sky, i.e. the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn).

If you believe in the "standard 9" you're just insisting on returning to a scientific definition of planets but one that is frozen on our scientific understanding from a few decades ago...

As you can see, there are many valid ways to go about understanding what a planet is in a cultural sense.

The argument is to not make any changes to what people call planets but to instead have taken the opportunity in 2006 to create a separate classification system. Use something vaguely Latin sounding like planitus or whatever.

Yes, but again, what people call planets was stable for over a thousand years before changing rapidly in the past few centuries (first with the Sun and Moon being removed during the Copernican revolution, then Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta being added before being removed when they discovered a bunch of other asteroids, then Neptune being added, and finally in the last century Pluto being added before being removed after they discovered a bunch of other dwarf planets).

If you don't like changes to what people call planets, you should be unrolling all the other changes that have also been made, and go back to the original definition that stood from ~200 BCE-1700 CE.

Right, and then everybody would be in the comments complaining about how "everybody is using a new term for planet and it's ridiculous, just call them planets". It's not a battle that can be won.

This is what should have happened. (And it’s not too late — Pluto will remain with us for a while yet.)

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