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Geologists Angry About New 'Pluton' Definition
An anonymous reader writes "According to a story over at Nature, some geologists are ticked off at the International Astronomical Union for using the word 'pluton' to describe a round object orbiting the sun with a period more than 200 years. A pluton, it seems, is a common type of rock formation that exists in most Geology 101 curricula. IAU head Owen Gingerich is quoted as saying that he was only peripherally aware of the definition, and because it didn't show up on MS Word's spell check, he didn't think it was that important."
pluton |plotän| noun Geology a body of intrusive igneous rock. ORIGIN 1930s: back-formation from plutonic .
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." -- John Ashcroft
"Pluton" IS Pluto, transliterated... Uran, Neptun, Pluton are three last planets in Russian, or whatever they are called now. I had to stop reading and give myself some time to parse (in lexical, not synctactic way! :-) ) the announcement to realize that what they are talking about is just a "pluto-ish" object!
Paul B.
A French missile
Or....maybe we should be angry at the academics who obviously are not running OpenOffice on Linux.
Nice tr(y|oll), but the OpenOffice dictionary doesn't recognize pluton either.
Anyhow, Word and OpenOffice both look like shit. If they want to be taken seriously, they should be using TeX, LaTex, or at least troff.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
No. Smurf replaced adjectives and occasionally a verb. But, Marklar replaces nouns.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
This is far from the first time that a term has been overloaded. It happens all the time across fields, sometimes even within (I'm looking at you computer science).
It isn't overloading because overloading is for function calls (or object creation). In language the closest thing to an overloaded function would be a verb (and we have many overloaded verbs that depend upon their arguments). A pluton is a noun so the closest thing in computer science is a data type. You can't overload data types in most languages but you can use namespaces or non-global variables. Fortunately, we as humans always know which namespace we are in without qualification. But if the geologists want to really be anal they can always say Geology::pluton or Astronomy::pluton.
Another option is the case where some languages allow overloaded data types but depend upon the typechecking of the language to sort things out. But since English is notoriously poor at type checking, we probably shouldn't use this feature (though we do such as for puns).
Given the size of (astronomical) plutons, if one crashed into the Earth, said geologists would have much important things to worry about. Such as the ongoing mass extinction and nuclear winter, for instance.
Pirate Party UK
pluton, n: The ninth planet in sol's solar system in spanish!, I guess that means the astronomers haven't bothered with learning latin for a while either.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
He took the term because the thin slice of cork at which he was looking had structures that reminded him of Monks' cells.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.