I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic with this or not but I wanted to write about this but ultimately decided to leave it out.
Beyond just the nomenclature, I do agree with you that the modern American house design bakes in an associate between space and status that feels problematic in many different contexts but especially in the context of family. Often, the master bedroom isn’t just bigger but also is built with more luxurious furnishings and higher end features under the assumption that the master of the house “deserves” to be living in nicer circumstances than the other members and that houses serve to reinforce hierarchy for the nuclear, atomic family that lives in them.
The childhood home I grew up with had 4 bedrooms of varying sizes which lead to my parents having to pick which of the children “deserved” the bigger bedroom and what that meant for the social dynamics among the children. There was no reason why the floorplan could not have been adjusted so that all 3 non-primary rooms were approximately the same size and there was no reason why one child intrinsically needed any more room than another child but the choice was forced on us that one child got the “better” bedroom and another got the “worst” one.
Later, living with roommates, it was always the awkward negotiation of who got the master bedroom, mainly because none of us really wanted it and we had to figure out who had to pay how much extra rent for the extra space that they didn’t really care about, because houses are built for nuclear families and not co-equal roommates.
In the workplace as well, people who are higher status are given an office with a door that closes and lower status people work in an open floor plan. As a manager, I’ve always thought this was exceedingly ridiculous as being in an office hindered my work vs sitting in the same pod as my team. There was one job I had where one team member regularly had to make phone calls so I switched desks with them and I was sitting with the rest of my team while that team member got the office and… people started losing their minds. The team member actually privately asked me to switch back with them because of the amount of flak they were getting from people in completely unrelated parts of the company. We ended up compromising of nobody inhabiting the office full time and having people pop in there when they needed to make a phone call but it was interesting to me just how much you couldn’t give people space due to need, you could only hand out space due to status.
Obviously, different people will have different needs for space dependant on circumstance, two people living in the same room should probably have a bigger room than solo people, but I see no reason why houses couldn’t be built with a mix of Large rooms (designed for 2 people to live in them), Medium rooms (designed for one person) and Small rooms (for hobby rooms or guest bedrooms) and for each to be a roughly standardized size.
You might have families today which comprise of, say, a divorced dad living with an adult child and their spouse who are economically unable to afford to move out, living in a 2BR house. The dad is occupying the master bedroom because he is the economic provider in the house while the child is crammed into the smaller room with their spouse because that’s how status embeds itself. If you renamed the rooms to the Large room and the Medium room, perhaps the family could see it makes more logical sense for the child and spouse to occupy the large room and that the parent only needs the medium room for his needs.
You could also support more varied family structures like intergenerational families that might need multiple large rooms or renters that need many medium rooms only etc. and recognize that not everyone in America lives in atomic nuclear families, and they shouldn’t have to pretend like they do.
I’m not saying just changing a few words around is going to fix the world or anything, but it does help us notice embedded assumptions and ask us if we want to consciously choose them or whether we adopted them simply because that’s what our culture imprinted on us.