Comment on Dwarf Planets are people too
GraniteM@lemmy.world 21 hours agoThere are plenty of linguistically unintuitive artifacts kicking around (a peanut is neither a pea nor a nut, a jellyfish is not a fish, all of the “berries” which aren’t berries), but if we’re deliberately creating brand new labels in the 21st century, it might have been nice if we’d avoided that kind of oddness, given the opportunity.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 19 hours ago
It’s kind of a leap to hear “dwarf planet” and think that it’s denigrating people with dwarfism in any way.
GraniteM@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
It’s not a direct connection, but trying to say a dwarf planet isn’t a planet, when it’s got the word planet right there, is generating the kind of semantic confusion that, carried forward, would lead to the conclusion that people with dwarfism aren’t people. The -oid suffix already conveys “is almost the thing, but not quite,” such as in words like humanoid, asteroid, android, and (most importantly) the aforementioned planetoid. Making planetoid the official word for “is in ways like a planet but actually isn’t” would have been working with existing etymology, rather than creating needless confusion.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
I’d certainly support not using “dwarf” in the names of celestial bodies any more, although it would make the Red Dwarf’s name anachronistic.
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