"What does 'curl' do?"

"Does what it says on the tin page."

  $ tin curl
  # get the contents of a web page
  curl https://news.ycombinator.com/

Well, no. ^^

I just looked up `man` in the book I learned basic Linux usage from and the section is labeled "Manpages" and before the first "man" occurs the abbreviation is explained: "You can look up these manual pages with the program `man`." (Translated from German). Not being a native speaker I didn't even associate it with men before.

> Either way, newcomers do not have the luxury of this association so will have to deal with the gender reminder from man and bro pages.

They can if they are introduced it correctly: "Hey how does Y work? - Take a look at the manpage - The what? - The manual page. Let me show you…". And this abbreviation can totally be justified in a context where even "move" and "list" are shortened.

> Eventually the same will happen for bropages.

Possibly, but the bad joke will always stick. Heck, you can't even explain where the name comes from without explicitly invoking this association.

Maybe the divide in our community also partially originates from different associations with `man`. Even if bropages didn't have any gender issues I would still think its not a good name, because (as said before and before) for me man pages have nothing to do with men. Possibly if I would "get" the joke I would be more reluctant to give the name up.