Venetia Phair, namer of Pluto

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Obituary in the New York Times, Monday 11 May:

Venetia Phair Dies at 90; as a Girl, She Named Pluto

She died on 30 April at her home in Banstead, Surrey.
The core of the story:

On March 14, 1930, the day newspapers reported that the long-suspected "trans-Neptunian body" had been photographed for the first time, she [Venetia Katherine Burney, aged 11] proposed to her well-connected grandfather [Falconer Madan, retired librarian of the Bodleian Library at Oxford] that it be named after the Roman god of the underworld.

She is featured in the 2008 documentary Naming Pluto.

(Pluto was demoted from "planet" to "dwarf planet" not long ago, a development we've commented on here on Language Log several times — most recently here, with links to earlier postings.)



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