Vakkotaur

There is a mnemonic for remembering the order of nine planets. Going outward from the sun, it is: My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas. With the current contested definition of a planet excluding Pluto, that would no longer apply and so a new mnemonic is needed.

In an editorial in the November 2006 Sky & Telescope, Richard Tresch Fienberg has a suggestion:

Many Very Egotistical Malcontents Just Screwed Up Nomenclature.

It's not about whether or not Pluto is a planet, but that the adopted definition of planet isn't very good. As he put it, "...we got a definition that reads like it came from bureaucrats, not scientists."

With Earth-grazing asteroids, is Earth a planet? What's the difference, if any, between a large planet and a small Brown Dwarf? Why does this definition of a planet only apply to our own solar system? With discoveries of planets around other stars... can they be called planets? Overall, it's a bad definition. The good news is that the definition will almost certainly be changed at the next IAU conference in 2009. Meanwhile Sky & Telescope won't be using the new definition without qualifiers. Thus Pluto might get called a "dwarf planet" but not a dwarf planet. The quotation marks will be there. Seems reasonable to me.