Can we officially rename Uranus to Caelus? Uranus (more accurately, Ouranos) is a Greek god. Besides Earth, all the other planets are named after Roman gods, thus Uranus should be named Caelus to be consistent.
I've always preferred "Terra" or "Gaia" to "Earth."
It could be a preference from video games, or maybe it’s because the common usage and being a synonym for ground and dirt has made the word seem ”low-brow” and the alternatives classy, exotic or poetic, and if their popularity was reversed we would think "Earth" was a classier word, but still.
“Terrans” will always sound better than “Earthlings” however. :)
Earth comes "from Middle English erthe, from Old English eorþe (“earth; Earth”), from Proto-Germanic erþō (“earth”), from Proto-Indo-European h₁er- (“earth”)."
Also (from the page for lowercase "earth"): "Probably unrelated, and of unknown etymology, is Old Armenian երկիր (erkir, “earth”)). Likewise, the phonologically similar Proto-Semitic *ʾarṣ́- (whence Arabic أَرْض (ʾarḍ), Hebrew אֶרֶץ (ʾereṣ)) is probably not related."
I think this is just one instance of a near-universal perception among English speakers that Greek/Latin words ("Terra") sound more sophisticated than Anglo-Saxon ones ("earth").
It's hard to hypothesize about whether this could be reversed in an alternate universe because this tendency goes back many centuries: for a loooong time Latin was the language of the scholarly and political elite, whereas Anglo-Saxon Old English was used by commoners.
It's not named after the sky. It's named after the God of the Sky, which doesn't bother me any more than other planetary bodies being named after deities of couriers, beauty, war, thunder, agriculture, ocean, the underworld, and so on.
The main reasons to rename Uranus is 1) consistency and 2) the puns. Either name it Caelus to be consistent with the naming convention used for the other planets or name it Ouranos to be closer to its Greek spelling and pronunciation.
I prefer (1) because the current situation is similar to having a codebase where all class names are PascalCase but there's this one class name in Upper_Snake_Case.
Is it really worth the waste of time it would be to debate this at the IAU and the confusion it would cause? Dwarf planets don't follow any set mythology (e.g., Makemake follows Easter Island mythology). Most people aren't experts of Greek and Roman mythology. The English language is full of inconsistencies.
That's a reason to keep the name - it's a rich seam that never seems to run dry. Also, if we did want to change the name, we all know what the anointed successor is...