Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Plutoed

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Hard to believe it's been two years now since Pluto was demoted to "Dwarf Planet" status. Does anyone else find it weird to look at modern textbooks with a list of the Eight Planets of the Solar System??

RIP Pluto
Perhaps the most amusing development I've seen thus far has been the addition of the following paragraph in the Wikipedia, which cracks me up:

"The verb to pluto (preterite and past participle: plutoed) was a neologism coined in the aftermath of its transition to dwarf planet. In 2007, the American Dialect Society chose "plutoed" as its Word of the Year, defining "to pluto" as "to demote or devalue someone or something," as happened when the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union decided Pluto no longer met its definition of a planet."

Some people have a harder time letting go than others. There is now an official Facebook group entitled, "When I Was Your Age, Pluto Was a Planet." I can't wait to go around saying that to little kids in my golden years.

Alas Pluto, we hardly knew ye.