This is the kind of thing they do in the Illinois Senate? Really? No wonder Obama voted "present" all those times - a meaningless vote on a meaningless question.

As noted in the source, Pluto is "officially" a dwarf planet, and no, not everybody is happy about it. As for definitions, well, you personally can call it whatever you want and nobody will stop you. Call it Iskandar if you are so inclined, or Gamelan. But at some point, in order for language to work, you need to have some mutual understanding and agreement about what words mean. If I were to try and convince you that there are 6 snarfblatts and 3 dinglehoppers revolving around the Sun, you'd have no blessed idea what I was talking about unless I could find some common ground of terminology that we could use to explain the different between a snarfblatt and a dinglehopper.

"But!" you say, "We all agreed for almost 70 years that Pluto was a planet!" Not necessarily true. It was always iffy. The problem is that over the years, more and more stuff with Pluto's same characteristics was also discovered - most notably the discovery of Eris in 2003, which is apparently bigger than Pluto. So the question is really whether all those other things are also planets, because if they are not, then why does Pluto get to get grandfathered in? Do we really want the definition of the word to be "this that and the other thing, and oh yeah by the way Pluto."
Source(s):
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/pluto.html

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