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> with everybody working themselves into a lather over the promise of WAP

If this was an intentional pun over the recently-acquired other meaning of "WAP", my compliments, it was perfectly executed.



Intentional or not, WAP (Wiresless Application Protocol) was a real protocol that allowed you to surf the web on a cellphone in the late 90s/early 20s, before 3G was a thing. Most websites (or wapsites) were super barebones and relatively fast for me, and you could find interesting stuff like cracked .jars of popular games or of course, porn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol


To be fair, with the current web bloat, wap sites were faster to open than many todays sites, even on 5G.


I remember using and WAP2IRC gateway to impress my IRC buddies.


They had to be barebones. WAP only supported text and tiny black and white (no greyscale) images. I did some WAP sites and it was pretty horrible to work with even back then. The phone I used (Nokia 7110) didn't even support GPRS so you had to make a call at 9600 baud and pay per minute so you didn't want to hang around either.

The Japanese had i.mode which was much more powerful. They tried to introduce it in Europe but by then the smartphone was already coming.


If you're referring to sexual reference`, those preceed the wireless protocol by some centuries.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/wap


Why are people using euphemisms here? The sexual reference: WAP stands for "wet ass pussy", popularized by Cardi B: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsm4poTWjMs. The music video has over 400M views.


Maybe in some countries. I only knew about the phone use for WAP.


I'd managed to forget that usage, though I've commented on it previously (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24396681#24406061).

Apparently I've now lost that game.

The term (as a word, not an acronym) is also used to refer to self-indulgence, generally among males. That and earlier references suggesting various modes of beat being laid down are what I was referencing with my etymology link above.


According to GP's link, it looks like the word has been slang for fucking for some time (probably as a verb?)

Wonder if that word is where 'fap' comes from (meaning 'to masturbate')


"Fap" began as onomatopoeia popularized by the Sexy Losers webcomic, first appearing in https://www.sexylosers.com/comic/003/ (NSFW in case that wasn't obvious).


Holy crap, I grew up reading that comic and never realized it had such a wide audience

If there is one thing that really educated me about kink, it's that comic

Cool!


Never heard of it before.


XKCD #37 seems relevant... though I'm not willing to put money on where the hyphen is intended in that acronym.

https://xkcd.com/37/


There is a more recent one, popularized in 2020 as an acronym.


I'd managed to put that out of my mind. See earlier reply in thread.




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