Mind your language
THE most annoying new words to catch my attention this year are Wap phone. This is partly because the thing itself is annoying. More than 200,000 have been bought, and now people, including my dear daughter Veronica, find that they don't bloody work, as she neatly puts it.
They are supposed to download pages from the Internet and send off messages by email. At best they do all this five times more slowly than ordi- nary computers — and you know how slow those can be.
The next annoyance factor is that Wap is an acronym. But I have seldom met anyone who knows what it stands for. The answer is 'Wireless Applica- tion Protocol', which sounds like a piece of anti-Semitic sci-fi. An alterna- tive name for the same thing is GPRS (which I admit is worse, being unpro- nounceable), standing for 'General Packet Radio Service'. This sounds more like Para Handy, although I am also reminded by the initials of Evelyn Waugh's delighted use in French of TSF (Telegraphie Sans Fil) for wireless.
And then, how do you pronounce Wap? There is already a word wap, which like wasp, wash and so on has its vowel sounded as an o, `wop'. One obsolete meaning of wap is illustrated by A new dictionary of the terms ancient and modern of the canting crew by B.E. (1699) thus: 'If she won't wap for a Winne, let her trine for a Make — If she won't Lie with a Man for a Penny, let her Hang for a Halfpenny.' Hence the term 'Mort wap-apace — A Woman of Experience'.
If the Wap-phone-carrying classes rely on making trysts by Wap-broad- cast, they'll be on a Wapping to noth- ing, poor innocents.
Dot Wordsworth
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