[dan-robertson]

Is the suggestion there actually complaining about landlord being a gendered word? I didn’t even realise that people thought landlord was gendered although I know landlady is a word. Often a landlord is a company, for example.

But if you actually look at the suggestions, aren’t they sometimes better in the sense of being more precise? Proprietor works better for describing a pub landlord, for example, as many pubs are being managed by people who rent the building, landlord could confusingly either refer to the person running the business or to the company owning the building, though I guess to some extent proprietor has that problem too. If you’re talking about a rental property instead, landlord is probably more precise because eg your landlord might own a lease and be subletting rather than owning the property itself.

[sacrosancty]

Sometimes people in my culture treat obviously gendered words as gender-neutral to the point that they re-gender them when they need to be specific. For example "policeman lady", "postman lady" or "men's perfume". So I think the gender-neutralizing of words happens naturally without having to change the word itself, just like your example of landlord becoming gender neutral.

[jhanschoo]

> But if you actually look at the suggestions, aren’t they sometimes better in the sense of being more precise?

I didn't know the distinction until you pointed it out, and didn't know very well the range of meanings proprietor had until now. Which I suppose highlights an important problem with such suggestions: if they suggest replacing a term A with a more precise term B that does not signify what was intended to be conveyed by A, based on concerns that both author and audience do not care about, and the author blindly accepts the suggestion, then such suggestions are creating miscommunication.