The International Astronomical Union all but threatened to go out on strike last month unless the rest of the solar system ejected an errant, puny member from the exclusive planets' club. Thus, on the vote of a few residents of the hegemonic planet Earth, Pluto -- a celestial body whose only crime was to dare to wander in orbit to the beat of a different drummer -- was stripped of its 76-year-old classification. Pluto is now officially downgraded to a new category called dwarf planet, and all textbooks in all languages are ordered to refer to it with that adjectival derogation. World media, except a few unscientific sentimentalists (and the fictional Lois Lane's Daily Planet) are meekly complying.

The pejorative designation decreed by the stargazers' union presuming to represent the solar ''Club of Eight'' is bottomed on dwarf star, defined as ''relatively small, with low mass and below-average luminosity.'' (Our sun falls into that demeaning category, but even so, sunblock is recommended.) The interest of language mavens in this astronomical rejiggering is the connotation of the words dwarf and planet.

Dwarf, as both noun and adjective, means ''shorter than the average for the species,'' sometimes ''malformed or disproportionate.'' Because of cruel folklore portraying those affected by dwarfism as ugly Rumpelstiltskins, many with that genetic abnormality prefer to be called ''little people'' or ''of short stature.'' Midget, though well proportioned, is used to describe objects like tiny cars and submarines, and many little people take offense when the word is applied to them. The standard plural of dwarf is ''dwarfs,'' like Snow White's Seven, though the novelist J.R.R. Tolkien has popularized dwarves.

Planet and planetary are rooted in the Greek planasthai, ''to wander'' (Pluto wandered too far). These words are gaining a political coloration. A recent visit to Australia by Mikhail Gorbachev drew a headline ''Former Soviet Supremo in Brisbane to Promote Planetary Perestroika.'' A Boston Globe article noted Colin Powell's visit to the U.N. three years ago ''to convince the world of the planetary threat of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.'' But environmentalists have been gravitating the use of planet, substituting it for world, as others cool toward global.

''Worried about a potential planetary crisis,'' William Broad wrote in The Times this summer, ''these leaders are calling on governments and scientific groups to study exotic ways to reduce global warming.. . .'' Roger Lewis of The Washington Post reported on ''green architecture'' at the National Building Museum, referring to ''atmospheric carbon dioxide and its planetary consequences.'' And Al Gore's book ''An Inconvenient Truth'' was subtitled ''The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It.''

To my ear, many liberals are taking up the vogue use of planet and planetary while conservatives cling to world, worldwide and global (strategy, not warming). Marshall McLuhan would probably now be writing about a planetary village. ''To save the planet'' connotes practical environmentalism, while ''to save the world'' connotes dreamy idealism.

''The growing use of planetary,'' opines Tom Pitoniak, an editor at Merriam-Webster, ''might be a symptom of a changing worldview, of people getting more conscious of our situation in a multigalactic universe. But there are still contexts where, if you use planetary, you'll sound as if you're in the realm of spaceships. Newt Gingrich said, a few weeks ago, that we were in World War III; if he had said that this was 'Planetary War III,' you would have thought that aliens were landing.''

To whom, then, would the melodramatic suicide note -- ''Goodbye, cruel world!'' -- be addressed? Though a planet is a physical world, the metaphoric world -- of ideas, of work, of entertainment -- is larger than the planet Earth. If a dwarf planet were a person, Pluto would be in a world of hurt.


Some of our top intelligence officials are irritated at the way their analysts have been playing down reports from agents in the field of contacts between Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran's Revolutionary Guard. Gun-shy after criticism about past analyses of a series of contacts between Saddam's Iraq and Al Qaeda, they are said to be ''unwilling to make judgment calls.. . .We're not in a court of law,'' a source identified as ''a senior United States official'' told Mark Mazzetti of The Times. ''When they say there is 'no evidence,' you have to ask them what they mean -- what is the meaning of the term 'evidence'?''

(Guide to sourcemanship: ''a senior United States official'' is a political appointee over 30. ''A senior agency employee'' is a midlevel careerocrat looking out a Langley window and dreaming about a book contract. No confidential informant is ever identified as ''junior,'' which would impugn the status of the source. )

The job of a rhetorician is to answer rhetorical questions. I would sharpen the question, ''What is the meaning of the word evidence?'' by adding ''and how is it different from proof?'' Here's an answer:

First, forget the clich?odifier credible; when it comes to evidence, what is believable to one analyst is incredible to another. Evidence may be hard or soft, conflicting or incontrovertible, it may be unpersuasive or convincing, exculpatory or damning, but with whatever qualifier it is presented, the noun evidence is neutral: it means ''a means of determining whether an assertion is truthful or an allegation is a fact.''

But here's the rub that rubs so many intelligence analysts the wrong way: Evidence -- from tips, taps, tapes, testimony, confessions, weapons, documents, satellite photos and the like -- is not in itself proof. Only the conclusion that experienced minds draw from a weighing of all the evidence can approach proof. With that requirement for human judgment understood, intelligence analysts can take their best shot.

Drawing: Lettering by Damien Correll