How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [96]
Resolution 5A, Section 2 starts “a dwarf planet.” Could you put dwarf planet in inverted commas, put quotation marks around dwarf planet? It is a definition. It should be in quotation marks.
The press assembled with me chuckled.
At the beginning of 5A we talk about planets and other bodies. That could be taken to include satellites. We didn’t mean it to include satellites but it could be read to mean satellites.
The assembled press looked at me to see if this was significant. I shrugged my shoulders.
I suggest in part 3 of 5A where it says “all other objects” you insert “except satellites” and thank you to the people who suggested those points. I think they are a great improvement.
Chuckles all around.
The order in which we have the resolution printed is not the order in which some countries do business. In some countries you do the amendments first and then vote on the substantive resolution.
More laughs.
“Wait!” I said, quickly turning the volume down. “This comment is really important. This part is insidious. This is deliberate! 5B, which is an amendment to 5A, is voted on after 5A. 5A, which says Pluto is not a planet, will have general support, and then 5B will get snuck in to subvert the intentions of 5A. And no one seems to care.”
But no one other than me seemed to grasp the enormity of the conspiracy at hand. Sure, perhaps I was a bit on the exhausted side at this point and inclined to believe that the secret committee had also conspired to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, Archduke Ferdinand, and Julius Caesar, but just because I was being paranoid didn’t mean I was wrong.
I turned the volume back up, and we were back to punctuation:
The inverted commas look right when you see them, but you don’t speak them. Could you not think of a new word which doesn’t exist in the dictionary so that it doesn’t have any baggage, and instead of calling it “dwarf planet,” use some word, since it’s an entirely new thing.… What you need is a new word rather than combination of old words; but a planet is a planet and so is a dwarf planet from a schoolmaster point of view.
I was feeling punchy and kept interjecting. “Yeah, he is right,” I muttered. “ ‘Dwarf planet’ is a dumb phrase. For years we’ve called things like Pluto and Xena ‘planetoids’—planetlike. That was a perfectly good word yesterday. But they’re trying to be sneaky, they are. ‘Dwarf planet’ is dumb, but they need it so Pluto can become a planet with 5B.”
The press at this point began to think that I was perhaps as crazy as all of the astronomers arguing over punctuation in Prague.
A question from the astronomical floor: “How does Charon fit?”
Right. At this minute there is confusion about Charon. If we pass 5A, Charon is not a planet. Right now I think there is confusion.
Someone else interjected: “It’s a satellite! As long as it remains a satellite, it’s out with this resolution.”
Comment: “A point of clarification for me: Is a dwarf planet considered a planet?”
“That is Resolution 5B.”
“In 5A a dwarf planet is not a planet?”
“Right.”
In perhaps my favorite exchange of the very early morning, the question “Do I understand correctly that we are not anymore entitled to use the word ‘planet’ for planets around other stars?” elicited the response: “Are you referring to floaters, sir, or are you talking about extrasolar planets?”
Floaters? All I could think of were those little spots that you can sometimes see floating in your eye. I never heard the answer because I was at this point just shaking and shaking my head wondering how much longer this could possibly go on.
From a pedant: “Last Friday you mentioned we are not voting on the footnotes, but now you are referring to the footnotes. So are we voting on the footnotes or not?”
Response: “We were at one point trying to say that the footnotes are not part of the resolution.