Proposal: Uranus et. al. should no longer be called "plane-ettes".

[Maat Mons]

The IAU is the recognized body that has established the guides on the names, as linked above.

By “recognized body” you mean numerous people choose to treat them as having authority. This is just a roundabout way of using common consensus to define words. Consensus regarding authority is just as ephemeral as consensus regarding definitions. As soon as people stop treating the IAU as the authority on the names of celestial bodies, it stops being the authority. Not using the names proscribed by the IAU is implicitly retracting any authority they’ve been granted. So yes, if enough people call it “Luna,” its name does become Luna.

Just like how if i call you "Matty Moon" and it catches on and everyone starts calling you that and it's obvious who they mean, that's still not your username and never will be unless you change it. Because names don't follow the same linguistic rules as words. The historical figure was not named Julius Tzar or Julius Kaiser.

While it’s generally accepted that a person has the right to determine how people refer to them, objects lack any capacity to make such a determination for themselves. There’s an argument to be made that the people who live in a place should have the right to determine how that place is referred to, but Luna lacks a population, and I suspect you don’t call Italy “Italia,” Germany “Deutschland,” and China “Zhongguo.”

That being said, i also don't want to hijack this thread over the moon, so this is where I'll just have any further rebuttals stand unopposed.

Aww, that’s no fun.

Beyond that, I find it slightly worrying when someone appears to regard "actual" as a synonym for "official". I'll admit that I haven't personally read 1984, but I feel like I've gotten the gist of at least parts of it.

I have read it. One of the government’s acts was to do a major overhaul of English, but nobody actually uses the overhauled version in day-to-day conversation.

Fortunately, being British, I don't have to listen to what some Yankee book says about the language or treat it as a reliable source.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary was the book that proscribed brand new spellings for words that Americans had previously been writing the same way as the British, setting us up for a world with multiple different “official” spellings, so I can understand the scorn.

I quite agree. I shall continue calling them planets or exo-planets, and never plane-ettes. I mean, it's not like they're plane-shaped, anyway. Although plane-ette is a decent term for a pocket plane.

It occurs to me I never fulfilled my original purpose in coming to this thread, suggesting we call them “spherettes.” Then larger celestial bodies can me “spherezillas.”