Pluto in Gemini

Pluto was named by a schoolgirl, and somewhere in your family there is a child who names every cat, car and houseplant, and would have done the same.

Named at breakfast

When Pluto was found in 1930, the new planet needed a name, and the winning suggestion came from an eleven-year-old in Oxford, Venetia Burney. Over breakfast, the story goes, the child heard the news read out and suggested the Roman god of the underworld, for a planet so far and dark that the name fit. The family passed it to an astronomer friend, and it was chosen from hundreds. Gemini, Mercury’s sign of words and messages, is where a single word can carry that kind of weight.

Mass words

As its children grew up, newspapers reached every household, most children learned to read, the telegraph and telephone spread, and a single printed story could move a whole country. Propaganda, advertising and the popular press all began in those decades. Words had become power, and everyone knew it. They read aloud to each other in the evenings, argued politics on street corners, and signed petitions by the thousand.

In your family’s past

They were great arguers. Look at any letter or marked-up newspaper they kept, you can see it: opinions underlined, articles cut out and kept, long replies written to editors. Some sent an editor a letter every week for decades. They memorised long poems at school and could still recite them when they were very old.

Words as weapons

Manipulation is the dark side of word-power. The same presses that spread education also spread hatred, and this generation was the one sent to fight a war that words had helped to start.

Much later

Pluto does not return to Gemini until 2127, and whoever arrives then inherits the same question in a louder world: who controls what everyone reads, and what it does to them.

Their words outlasted them, in archives and family Bibles and boxes of letters in attics, and now and then someone opens one and hears a voice a century old say exactly what it meant.