Slashdot Mirror
Girl Who Named Pluto, At 11, Dies At 90
notthepainter notes the passing of the woman who, as an 11-year-old girl, named Pluto. "Frozen and lonely, Planet X circled the far reaches of the solar system awaiting discovery and a name. It got one thanks to an 11-year-old British girl named Venetia Burney, an enthusiast of the planets and classical myth. On March 14, 1930, the day newspapers reported that the long-suspected 'trans-Neptunian body' had been photographed for the first time, she proposed to her well-connected grandfather that it be named Pluto, after the Roman god of the underworld. Venetia Phair, as she became by marriage, died April 30 in her home in Banstead, in the county of Surrey, England. She was 90. ... More vexing to Mrs. Phair was the persistent notion that she had taken the name from the Disney character. 'It has now been satisfactorily proven that the dog was named after the planet, rather than the other way around,' she told the BBC. 'So, one is vindicated.' " Venetia's great-uncle Henry, who was a housemaster at Eton, had successfully proposed that the two dwarf moons of Mars be named Phobos and Deimos.
This bitch couldn't tell the difference between a planet and a dwarf planet. Plus, why would you want to name a midgit-planet after a Disney character?
You know all Brits have bad teeth, right?
So no, she wasn't.
So all she did was assign a name that already existed? Oh wow. Now if she had come up with some cool original name, now that would have been noteworthy. But all she did was choose some unused name on the list of Roman/Greek gods. For all we know she threw a dart at it, Pluto could have very well been named Xerxes.
What I find baffling is that Goofy is a dog, and Pluto is a dog. But Goofy wears clothes, drives, and talks - and Pluto just runs around, barks and wags his tail.
What I find baffling is how this gets modded insightful? Just what was the insight here? That cartoon characters can be imagined differently?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Something's wrong with your 'c' key. It seems sometimes it prints out a * instead. Should get that fixed, it prevents REALLY REALLY STUPID people from realizing you typed 'fucking'