Pluto: A World By Any Other Name

So, what I've learned about the "Pluto: Planet or Not" issue from a very interesting but somewhat painful series of exchanges with a number of planetary scientists over the past couple of days:

1) Planetary scientists (at least this particular group) have no sense of humor whatsoever.

2) The Pluto "controversy", being very, very, VERY important to them, is all about a "turf war" between different factions of the International Astronomical Union. They're miffed because of political wrangling within the IAU which allowed the Anti-Pluto gang to slip in the vote after all the planetary types had departed for the airport, thus installing a new definition for the word Planet in the "official" rules of the astronomical nomenclature. Their point being that said definition is imperfect. Must be nice to know what "perfect" is. Considering that Planet is Ancient Greek for "Wanderer", which could represent ANY celestial body which appears to move against the background of stars, it seems to me that we might want to find a new WORD rather than trying to squeeze the vast variety of types of worlds into some re-definition of "Planet".

3) The actual impact of this demotion of Clyde Tombaugh's 1930 discovery is nil. We've sent an unmanned spacecraft zipping past Pluto (NASA's New Horizons probe 2015) and continue to learn new things about this distant but dynamic world; the New Horizons mission wasn't cancelled after the IAU decision with a "feh, it's only a dwarf planet" news-release.

4) Given the number of books, articles and videos that have been produced since this 2006 vote in the IAU, I can only presume that a substantial number of researchers have now built their careers (or at least financial side-lines) on this "is/is not" argument, so we won't be seeing an end to this any time soon.

5) In full knowledge that I'm about to bring the wrath of an entire community of noisy scientists down upon my little, pointy, scientifically-illiterate head, I propose that we stop beating this dead horse and move on. After all, we call our ancestor on this planet Australopithecus ("Southern Man") because her fossil remains were first discovered in the southern regions of Africa. Now that her bones have been found throughout the continent that name is no longer "perfect", but the name continues to be used.

6) Pluto still doesn't CARE whether it's known to humans as a "planet" or "dwarf planet" or KBO or Plutoid.

Get over it, please.