FWAK

A FWAK — false wisdom and knowledge — is a bogus FAQ, generally written on the subject of a particular video game for the purpose of humor but sometimes also to deliberately mislead (and often both). The name FWAK is a play on the pronunciation of FAQ ("fwack" versus "fack").

The first use of the term FWAK likely occurred in January 1996 in the Usenet newsgroup alt.games.final-fantasy (AGFF), when a contributor wrote elaborate, complicated, and false instructions for bringing General Leo back to life in Square Co., Ltd.'s computer role-playing game "Final Fantasy VI". The concept gained popularity for a time and FWAKs were written for other games such as "Final Fantasy VII" and "Chrono Trigger" and posted to AGFF.

Earlier, FWAK was also the name of a Dweezil Zappa song on the 1991 album Confessions. The overlap is coincidence and the usages are unrelated.

The word "FWAK" was used by the cartoonist Don Martin in his cartoons to describe certain sounds. The first time he used the word was to describe the sound made by a brick hitting the head of a character. The specific cartoon appeared in MAD Magazine in 1977.

References

* FWAK [http://usenetwiki.org/usenetwiki/UsenetGlossary UseNetWiki's Glossary] . Retrieved May 7th, 2005

External links

* [http://azusa.leamonde.net/ct-fwak.html FWAK for Chrono Trigger]