Quick. How many dwarfs are there and what are their names? Stick out your fingers and tally them off: Grumpy. Sleepy. Doc. Bashful. Happy. Sneezy. Dopey.

Seven. Count ‘em. Seven dwarfs. That’s the way it is, and that’s the way it always should be.

Now, let’s have a go at the commandments (if you have trouble here, just think about the title of the movie).

Well. That was easy. Of commandments, there are ten.

On to the Great Lakes. The memory clue here is HOMES. Huron. Ontario. Michigan. Erie. And Superior. Five Great Lakes. Always have been. Always will be.

We can also consider Santa’s Reindeer: Nine, if you include Rudolph. The deadly sins: Seven. My favorite being gluttony. The days of the week: Another Big Seven, including one day to rest. Well ... two days unless you’re self-employed. But that’s another story.

Now, here’s the question that should get your knees quivering and your socks rolling up and down: Ready?

HOW MANY PLANETS ARE THERE?

Don’t stop and think. Just answer. Starting with the one nearest to the sun, there are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Pluto. Nine planets, right?

We learned it in school. Our parents learned it in school. Our grandparents and their parents learned it in school. And our children are going to ... Oh, no. Wait. What’s this I hear?

An article in National Geographic News tells us that at a meeting in Prague of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a bunch of soul-less sky scanning killjoys (No. National Geographic didn’t call them that), voted to change the definition for the word planet.

“A full-fledged planet,” the IAU proclaims, “is an object that orbits the sun and is large enough to have become round due to the force of its own gravity. In addition, a planet has to dominate the neighborhood around its orbit.”

Pluto, according to these semantic thugs, is not big enough to dominate anything. That being the case, they have demoted it to “dwarf.”