-> I guess you're are saying that YOU are the authority when you are one of the 
-> folks participating in such "discussions". 
  
Yes. Usually I say, "It's my language, and I'll do what I like with 
it." 
  
-> Regardless, there is still no accepted definition among the experts in the 
-> field for the term "planet".  And this will continue to be
true until there  
-> such a consensus.  And when, if ever, there is such a consensus, how will we 
-> know without an appeal to authority? 
 
-> The question's rhetorical.  We won't have any way of knowing unless we appea 
-> to the experts in the field.  In other words, until we appeal to 
-> authority. 
  
I doubt very much that there will ever be such a consensus because the 
question is trivial. 
  
Did you see the movie, some years ago called "The Man Who Went Up a 
Hill and Came Down a Mountain" (or something of the sort)? It was a 
comedy, based on the arbitary definition, in Britain, of a mountain as 
a hill that is 1000 feet or more high. The inhabitants of a Welsh 
village were upset when a surveyor found that their local mountain was 
a few feet too short, and was therefore a hill. They decided to pile 
rocks on the top to make it a mountain. All kinds of idiocy resulted. 
Can we imagine a time when people own asteroids, and try to make them 
fit the definition of a planet? Only if such an exact definition is 
invented, for no significant purpose. 
  
                             dow 
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