Nah, it's not something that warrants a lynching, be it proverbial or not. I'd say mildly irritated.
Hey, there is an upside. It saves grammar school students the agony of having to learn the names of, currently, five more planet names (in order of distance from the sun) and possibly as many as two hundred more in the future.
ETA:
Then there is the question of if Haumea and Makemake should be names for planets. For dwarf planets, those names don't seem quite as odd for some reason.
You’ve hit the nail on what I originally wanted this thread to be about. At its core, it’s an English language question. I suspect you know darn well that Pluto is not a planet nor will it be taught in school as such. It still flies in the hearts of many as a planet, and it’ll go down in history as being formally classified as such, but no formerly used definition of “planet” is going to alter how the term is used by the scientific community that ultimately will pave the way for how it’ll be introduced into the vernacular of the young.
I had hoped that in this forum there would be a few to fall prey to the misleading nature of the term “dwarf planet,” but being the forum it is, I also had hoped a resounding more to jump in and readily recognize the issue for what it really is: a disconnect in understanding on how to properly interpret nouns masquerading as adjectives.
When classifications are made, words ordinarily used as adjectives are incorporated into noun phrases to capture understanding and support recognition, but as I’ve eluded to many times, the etymology of single words within multi-worded terms only stand in testament to why they are originally coined; multi-worded terms are terms in their own right and can evolve.
There have been many examples to exemplify this. One in particular is “toy car.” From a grammatical standpoint, one might think because of how the words are strung together that a toy car is a type of car, but that’s nonsense; it’s a type of toy!
I don’t have time at the moment to pull from memory all the examples I’ve came across recently, but before I bring this post to a close, I do have an example of how such things come to occur.
A person loves boots and decides to open a boot store and decides to give the store a name and aptly calls it Boot Store. Apart of his product line are accessories—not just boots, but the name still fits well, as the inventory is mostly (substantially) boots.
Over time, the owner’s daughter, fascinated with belts, finds a way to get ole pop to sell them as well. The daughter takes interest in the business, and with an overwhelming demand for the popular belts in the local community, the sales of belts start to outweigh the sales of boots. As the business expands and boot sales become more a thing of the past, the name that used to fit really no longer captures the core product currently sold.
One location has not a single pair of boots for sale, but the brightly lit shiny sign out front still reads “Boot Store”. Suffice it to say, it’s not a boot store, but without a doubt, it’s still referred to as the Boot Store. In this example, the capital letters are a dead give-away from when I’m using the words as a proper noun or not, but there are many two-worded terms in the English language that act like and thus should be treated like proper names even though they don’t carry with it signifying capital letters.
Consider “logically possible.” Who capitalizes that? But, as most can attest, one cannot accurately glean it’s meaning by referring to the meaning of its individual words. The term has a meaning in its own right.
The term “planet” now has a stipulated meaning and no longer merely functions as being a product of collective usage. We cannot go back to definitions of old without falling victim to the etymological fallacy. Yes, the naming of Pluto as a ‘dwarf’ planet has to do with size, but “dwarf planet” too has a stipulated meaning. It should be thought of in the same light we see Boot Store, not in the same light we see boot store.
