1)Is Uranus pronounced ** yur anis ** or ** urinis**?
2)Why is iron pronounced iorn?
Just curious.
- I believe it’s originally “yur anus,” but too many 7th graders giggled over that word, so people started saying “urine-us” (I don’t know when this happened, but I didn’t start hearing it until the mid-90s.) It doesn’t make any sense to me, because “urine-us” still has “urine” in it.
I still always say “yur anus”
- I’m not sure. I think it’s because the O “iron” is originally not totally pronounced, like “I-run.” Instead of saying “I-run” every time, it is much easier just to say “ayrn.”
Isaac Asimov pointed out the irony of avoiding “your anus” only to end up with “urinous”, which is sufficiently obscure that most people don’t hear the reference to urine.
Carl Sagan pronounced it “urinous” and I suppose he was talking like other astronomers do. One of our local Greek or Latin scholars could probably give us the Classical pronunciation. Just sounding out the syllables comes out something like ooh-rah-nuss, which doesn’t quite match either common pronunciation.
Of course it’s a much better joke when you look up at the stars and say “I see your anus!” than it is if you say “I see urinous!”. Then again, that joke is only funny about once in your life and that happens in roughly the third grade, so it’s not much help as a pronunciation guide.
I always use “Yer-Anus.” It’s traditional (at least the way I learned it), and it enables the classic joke:
What is the Starship Enterpriselike toilet paper?
Both circle Uranus looking for Klingons.
Why is the Starship Enterpriselike toilet paper?
Both circle Uranus looking for Klingons.
What does Luke Skywalker do every time he has to take a shit?
He uses the force. 
…ahhh… its a college thing too…
My best friend and I had an astronomy course in college and we went to a planetarium with a little movie… NOW I swear to GOD both of us are MATURE!! …but… when we’re together we revert back to 3rd grade where we met.
So this movie narrator starts talking about the “boulders and debris that circle your anus” and we were on the floor under the chairs trying not to get thrown out… sigh I know!
According to Futurama, the hopeless jokes about Uranus will cause it to be renamed in the future as Urectum.
He goes to the bathroom and takes a shit.
This reminds me of a joke my brother made up, which caused his friend to burst into hysterical laughter:
A girl looks in the toilet and sees a crap floating in it, and asks her mother “mom, what’s that?”
The mom says “IT’S A PIECE OF CRAP!!!”
AHAHAHAHEHEHEAHAHOAHOHHEHEHAHHAAAAHHH!!!
(Keep in mind, we were in elementary school at the time. But I still think it’s pretty funny.)
Hey, I just thought of something; there aren’t any bathrooms on the Millenium Falcon! (Or X-wings, obviously. And none are shown on the Death Star.) Unless they developed some kind of super portable waste disposal/energy conversion invention, they must be having a hell of a hard time trying to save the galaxy.