Maybe so, but as the wiki article points out in its criticism section, this excludes Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Neptune from being planets.
I don't think it's so much folly as much as a waste of everyone's time. "Planet" isn't a natural thing like the speed of light, if astrophysicists want to be more specific about which orbiting bodies they're talking about, which "dynamical processes" they're talking about, they should come up with a new term instead of dragging literally everyone (including the children!) into an argument over definitions. It's like a scientist insisting that "sound" can only refer to this vague thing a brain experiences, and it can't refer to generic vibrations in the air, but some people are still on the fence about whether it can refer to vibrations in water.
The IAU's definition is a scientific definition, one that pertains to usage among astronomers. Insisting that astronomers make up another word is silly for all the same reasons that (as you pointed out) it would be silly for astronomers to tell us how to use one of our everyday, non-technical words. The same sequence of characters or phonemes can have slightly different meanings in different contexts.
Note that I'm not saying that I think that dwarf planets should be categorized as planets (there are too many), but that the definition shouldn't depend upon us having complete knowledge of every object in a newly discovered potential planet's neighborhood.
I expect that there will be further 'evolutions' of the definition as we learn more and more about exoplanets, there are nearly 2000 of them already.
Seems like the biological sciences have done a decent job, you've got your common names and then Latin taxonomical descriptions which make up formal names.
"Most astronomers counter this opinion by saying that, far from not having cleared their orbits, the major planets completely control the orbits of the other bodies within their orbital zone. Although Jupiter does coexist with a large number of small bodies in its orbit (the Trojan asteroids), these bodies only exist in Jupiter's orbit because they are in the sway of the planet's huge gravity. Similarly, Pluto may cross the orbit of Neptune, but Neptune long ago locked Pluto and its attendant Kuiper belt objects, called plutinos, into a 3:2 resonance (i.e., they orbit the Sun twice for every three Neptune orbits). Since the orbits of these objects are entirely dictated by Neptune's gravity, Neptune is therefore gravitationally dominant."
It's not a waste of the astronomers' time, because they need a reasonable taxonomy to communicate with each other. It's clear that the current set of planets are different from the things that are not planets. If we included Pluto in the set of planets, we'd need to come up with a new word to describe the subset that does not include Pluto - so it's much easier to take Pluto out of that set, and continue calling them "planets".
Other people have wasted their own time by having an emotional attachment to what words the astronomers use.
With the advent of Galilean observations and Newtonian dynamics, "planet" came to mean "large body orbiting the sun", with asteroids being some object of indeterminate type (thus the weird name suggesting similarity to stars, not planets).
Concepts are made things. We divide reality up according to acts of selective attention based on what divisions are most useful to us. The way the world is, independently of us, constrains those divisions but does not determine them.
Most people are basically Platonists, and have a lot of trouble with this kind of epistemic pragmatism. Others--nominalists--reject the Platonic model with the claim that because categories are not determined by reality they must not be constrained by it.
Neither group has a good handle on how an apparently simple concept like planet can legitimately change over time while still being strongly constrained by objective reality as our knowledge expands and our purposes alter, but to an epistemic pragmatist it is precisely what you expect all concepts to do.
Words gain meaning not from what they mean, but from what they don't mean.
(Terra and Asteroid Belt)
FWIW, 2 * sqrt(32.6 AU / (8 * 9.81 m/s/s))) = https://www.google.com/search?q=sqrt%2820+AU+*+2+%2F+%288+*+... = 5.77 days.
Perihelion of 29.657 AU was in 1989, when it would have been 5.5 days. "Have Spacesuit Will Travel" was written in 1958, so the distance to Pluto was about what it is now. Earth orbit variability makes that +/- about 3 hours.
Top speed is sqrt(2 * (8 * 9.81 m/s/s) * (32.6 AU/2) ) / (speed of light) = 6.5% of light speed.
I'm not sure that Kip and Peewee would have survived 5+ days at 8 g. Apparently the only week-long >1 g tests we've done have been 1.5g, says http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6154/maximum-surviv... , though we've done tests for 1,000 seconds (16 minutes) at 4 g.
You don't see lawyers getting mad every time someone uses the term "relevant" incorrectly. They aren't phoning the dictionary people to say that the lawyer definition should trump common understanding and meaning.
The giant squid was once the biggest squid. Then came what we now know as the colossal squid. Technically, the word "giant" should only be applied to the biggest. But nobody seriously wanted to rename the giant squid. So they came up with a "colossal" exception to the rule. Sentimental attachment has value.
"Killer Whales" may not be whales (they are big dolphins) but nobody is our there correcting every mention of the term or going on John Stewart to lecture us on why we aren't using a scientific term in exactly the same manner as scientists do in papers. Whale biologists, despite following the most elevated of all scientific disciplines, still have that sense of humility so lacking amongst astronomers.