Your assumption might be the case for frankenstein, it’s a relatively short book.
The parent is most likely talking about books like the count of monte cristo. It goes on for more than a thousand pages, but was originally serialised over a couple years.
Similar things happen to older books. Current day editions of don quixote include don quixote part 2, which was a sequel published a decade after the first.
It isn’t so much that fedora is the best distro, just that all the other distros are worse.
Using it is just common sense, not something anybody would feel proud about.
English has the peculiarity of having two variants of the same word: “gender” and “genre” with slightly different meanings.
You could lean on it and go with genre. But just changing the word is unlikely to help much, the concept itself is deeply associated with genitalia in English culture, you’d still need to explain it.
The Wikipedia entry has a pronunciation guide:
English: [bɑːrsəˈloʊnə]
Catalan: [bəɾsəˈlonə]
The first a is a schwa and the o isn’t rounded. Honestly, it looks quite similar to English, to the point where there might be some English dialect that sounds exactly like that.