Comment by lowboy
11 years ago
The etymology is inoffensive, but the term itself is still exclusionary by way of "man" also being a gendered term. We are (and should be) more cognisant of these issues these days.
11 years ago
The etymology is inoffensive, but the term itself is still exclusionary by way of "man" also being a gendered term. We are (and should be) more cognisant of these issues these days.
No, you're wrong. "man" is the obvious abbreviation for "manual" when trying to reduce the number of characters used. Not once as a teenager learning unix shell commands did gender (or cultural stereotypes) enter my mind when using the 'man' command, but I guarantee it does when looking at the 'bro' command.
If something is obviously not meant to be offensive, but by some coincidence it is, then we should be offended by it?
One day I hope to live in a world where people judge text by what it means, not which particular squiggly patterns ended up on the screen...
We should trust that they meant well, but still tell them their fly is down. It's not that big a deal as long as you fix it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym