What something is called does matter

My comments are prompted by a seemingly innocuous Eos meeting report on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Small Bodies Educator Conference (Eos, 87(8), 2006). While I applaud the efforts that JPL and others go to in order to train educators and to educate the general public on advances in Earth and space science, I nonetheless take issue with the idea that, as it was reported educators were told, “what we call something is not really important.” This is an entirely specious claim, and I find it disturbing that such a perspective should ever find general acceptance.