The poor are still gentrification’s victims, but in this new meaning, the harm is not rent increases and displacement — it’s something psychic, a theft of pride. Unlike housing, poverty is a potentially endless resource: Jeff Bezos could Hoover up all the wealth that exists in the world, then do nothing but drink rainwater collected from the roof of his ’79 Vanagon, and it wouldn’t stop the other seven billion of us from being poor. What this metaphorical gentrification points to instead is dishonesty, carelessness and cluelessness on the part of the privileged when they clomp into unfamiliar territory. When they actually profit from their “discovery” and repackaging of other people’s lifestyles, it’s a dispiriting re-enactment of long-running inequalities. But what seems most galling isn’t that they’re taking dollars off the table. It’s that they’re annoying.

It’s not surprising that “gentrification” has become a more capacious idea lately: The phenomena it describes seem inescapable. But there’s something in this new usage that obfuscates as much as it reveals, lending cover to the much larger forces that shape our lives. Minority communities are being dismantled as macroeconomic winds transform urban America. Researchers are now concerned that the high cost of housing is a drag on our whole economy, with young people either trapped spending too much on rent or fleeing overheated urban markets altogether for places with worse jobs but cheaper housing. Some of them, I’ve heard, are even living out of vans.

The word “gentrification” was coined almost offhandedly in 1964, by the British sociologist Ruth Glass, in an essay about postwar London. Looking around her, she saw a city becoming more modern and affluent. This came with certain ills: Commutes were getting longer, traffic worse, middle-class jobs more specialized (“project engineer”; “system analyst”) and menial ones more scarce. And something striking was happening in the working-class parts of town. They were being “invaded by the middle classes — upper and lower.” These newcomers were buying up the “shabby, modest mews and cottages” and turning them into “elegant, expensive residences.” “Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district,” Glass writes, “it goes on rapidly until all or most of the working-class occupiers are displaced, and the whole social character of the district is changed.”

Her coinage contained within it an ambiguity that persists to this day. The root of “gentrification” — “gentry” — can refer either to those of not-quite-aristocratic birth or to those who profit from land ownership; either to the well-off in general or to the rentier class in particular. This lack of clarity is fitting: In a gentrifying neighborhood, title to the land is transferred first in the literal sense and then in the spiritual one, as local businesses and institutions change to serve the tastes of wealthier arrivals. To use “gentrification” to describe lifestyle trends is to focus on that second step rather than the first one — to focus on class signifiers instead of class itself.