Urbanism and Standards of Respectability

Re:Urbanism and Standards of Respectability by closeparen on Thursday March 08, 2018 @11:21PM (#16549769)

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.

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Re:Urbanism and Standards of Respectability by politician on Saturday March 10, 2018 @02:43PM (#16559837)

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...

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