There is a joke about how hard it is to find a venue for meetings of astronomers. Hotels don’t want to host them, because they’re such a serious lot that not enough drinks are sold to make it a profitable affair.

What astronomers lack in party skills they make up for in the field of argumentation. They fight about how the asteroid search should be conducted, they argue over what telescopes deserve NASA’s precious funding, and they have the occasional spat about whether an unseen thing around a faraway star is a planet or a brown dwarf.

But mostly they argue about Pluto. Heatedly for seven years now. It’s approaching comical. And I think even they can see the humor in it all. That Pluto was ever termed a planet was a grand error, many astronomers agree. But school children love Pluto, so an equal number of astronomers are loathe to cross them. An even larger number of astronomers, meanwhile, have kept their mouths shut the whole time.

This week’s proposal to finally create a definition for the word “planet” (isn’t that amazing that there has never been one?) has pulled the bystanders out of the bleachers and into the brawl. It’s as if a pitcher in game 7 of the World Series beaned Barry Bonds and there was no crowd control. Read for yourself.

Even supporters of the definition—which makes planets out of a whole lot of small round things—concede it’s not that great. But it’s better than no definition, they say. Funny thing, so many astronomers are sick of the whole thing, it just might pass in next week’s vote.

Okay, that’s not the really funny thing. The really funny thing is that Earth’s Moon might one day be considered a planet under the new definition.

With all due respect to what I know has been an arduous and serious process, let me propose some possible names for our wayward satellite, in keeping with “pluton,” the goofy term (people we interviewed laughed about it) that the astronomers came up with to describe little planets way out there. I’m thinking, for our venerable Moon-turned-planet: Planemoon, or Moonet, or my favorite: Moolanet. Accent on the “Moo.”

UPDATE: A 2nd definition has been proposed at the IAU meeting, one that would demote Pluto. Astronomers seem to be split about 50-50 on the two ideas now. One astronomer sent me this email: “A wild time in Prague.” And I don’t think he meant the hotels were making money.