You can become a homeowner by saving for a few years and then committing a healthy portion of your middle-class wage to a mortgage. You become landed gentry by being in the right place at the right time in a way that normal people who come after you can’t replicate (unless they’re your heirs), and then participating in a political system that keeps your inferiors in line.

I understand that you're trying to stretch this term to fit the SF situation, but the reality is that no one can become "landed gentry" outside of the British, Polish, or Chinese systems and also by traveling back in time to when these social classes operated.

Due to the impossibility of becoming "landed gentry" in the modern United States of America -- in the same way that being knighted is likewise impossible here -- using the phrase to describe a group of people is taken as intentionally misapplying a metaphor to insult, divide, denigrate, and bully the target group.

When folks misuse a term like "landed gentry" that tells me that the argument they want to signal is that "those people" are evil and bad while "our people" are good and honorable. Therefore, those people's homes should be taken away and replaced with high density housing for our people. That's certainly an argument. I personally don't find it particularly compelling, but I'm not an SF voter.

As far as MWOD, that publication might consider reviewing whether or not they should be making such low quality definitions publicly available -- it's a sad day when you're upstaged by Urban Dictionary [1].

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=landed+gentr...

Merriam-Webster[1] says: "wealthy people who own land ". I didn't realize there was a specific UK definition to this term though, thanks!

[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/landed%20gentry

After mulling over your response for a bit, I wanted to reach out and clarify that this term is not really "UK specific". Consider "knighthood", the British, as well as other countries granted knighthood to their subjects - "knight" is not "UK specific". That does not make "knight" universally applicable, however. For instance, one cannot become a knight of the United States of America. Likewise, "landed gentry" is a title granted to people under British, Polish, and Chinese systems in the past.

It's debatable whether MWOD is guilty of playing a dangerous game of propaganda by peddling low quality definitions online with high SEO. They have an ethical obligation to not revise words out from under the population unless, of course, they are a non-neutral party with a particular agenda.

It's not fair to people, like yourself, who want to advance strongly-felt arguments to spoil those arguments with terms based on these weak definitions just because they showed up high in Google Search results.

As the terms our society uses to communicate continue to degrade into group-specific definitions, we will generally lose the ability to communicate effectively across groups; and, in turn, the ability to compromise and negotiate in good faith.

In other words, one's political opponents might interpret a speech differently due to the use of a different dictionary rather than (merely) disagreement with a particular argument.

To glimpse at one dystopian future, consider that the recent phenomenon of declaring one's personal pronouns might soon include identification of one's personal dictionary, one's personal thesaurus, one's personal collection of idioms, and one's personal grammar.