I'm guessing that landlord/landlady doesn't leave room for alternative genders. Perhaps they need to invent "landperson". But inventing new words is probably outside their remit for this feature rollout. Bonus for removing the class implications. Oh and any trace of usefulness in the word's historical meaning.
Yeah this is actually a good example of how comfortable capitalism is subsuming subversive countercultural forces for its own purposes.
Landlord is a fairly loaded, and therefor powerful, word. It doesn't hide the archaic relationship it represents, or the power imbalance inherent in it. I'm sure a lot of landlords would prefer we use a more euphemistic term that does obscure those elements.
It is also gendered, which is unrelated to the first thing but can provide a proximate reason to encourage people to switch to a euphemism.
I'm not trying to conspiracy-brain this or argue that's a specific intended goal of google or this product or anything. It's just a fun illustration of a powerful and frightening trend that has been noted in all kinds of spaces for decades at this point.
Now this is a fucking interesting take. Yes, "landlord" has a history rooted in the middle ages, when lords literally owned the serfs who lived on their property. The (google-initiated??) attempt to remove that word from the language even after it survived into the modern day could very well be a subtle first attempt to see whether a corporation can deprive us serfs of the words we need to describe their dominance (and the offense it embodies to individual rights).
It's not quite conspiracy brained, because someone else pointed out here that no one - not even the wokest of woke - took issue with the word "landlord" before. This appears to be an example of a marketing team at Google going through tons of patterns and words that they would flag and trying to find one that won't yet be offensive to anyone because it's not yet become part of the culture war. They may even have invented it themselves just for the purpose of marketing this, uh, "feature".
I think you're right close to the center of describing what's happening in the corporate thrust to leverage wokeness as excuse to control speech on platforms. And I'm someone who appreciates good moderation - and always tried to practice it in my forums - but this ain't that.
That's so nineties it's quaint, even cute. Using the default masculine was totally reasonable for policewomen and actresses and manhole covers... but only made sense when the goal of rearranging language was about removing inequality, rather than establishing new hierarchies based on "identity" - which is a thing you can claim you chose or claim was forced upon you, as it suits you, depending on the rhetorical context. No, definitely a single or dual gender noun won't work. Maybe a system of emojis or animated gifs instead of the "lord" part of the word. We might need a new version of Unicode for this.
