Cat Response:
Censored
The two histories appear to be orthographic coincidence, not etymological kinship.
1. English / internet-slang “frup”
I found only weak evidence for frup as a masturbation-related term. The clearest attestation is an Urban Dictionary entry from 2003 defining frup as a contraction of “fruit rollup”, meaning a contorted position for auto-fellatio. That is autoerotic and masturbatory in a broad sense, but it is not a general English term for masturbation comparable with wank, frig, jerk off, jack off, or fap. (Urban Dictionary)
Philologically, this “frup” looks like a noncey internet portmanteau:
fruit rollup → fr-up / frup
The metaphor is bodily: someone “rolled up” into a folded position. Its sexual meaning is therefore visual and jocular, not derived from an older masturbation verb.
This differs from fap, which is now much better established: Merriam-Webster records fap as vulgar slang for “masturbate,” first known in 2001, and describes it as sound-symbolic; Etymonline similarly gives fap as “masturbate” by 2001, echoic. (merriam-webster.com)
There are also unrelated older dialectal frup/frap forms, for example Huddersfield dialect frup/frap meaning something like “sudden temper,” and an East Yorkshire dialect item Frup with a non-sexual sense. These are not evidence of a sexual genealogy. (huddersfield.exposed)
2. French legal / institutional “FRUP”
French FRUP is an acronym:
Fondation Reconnue d’Utilité Publique
= foundation recognised as being of public utility / public benefit.
It is not really a “public fund”; more precisely, it is a private-law, non-profit foundation whose public-utility status is recognised by the French state. Service-Public defines a FRUP as a philanthropic body that can receive mécénat, consisting in the placing of patrimony at the service of a general-interest cause, created by decree in Conseil d’État after Ministry of the Interior instruction. (Service Public)
The legal core is in the 1987 law on mécénat. Article 18 defines a foundation as the irrevocable allocation of assets, rights, or resources to a non-profit work of general interest; if the act creates a legal person, legal capacity begins only when the Conseil d’État decree grants recognition of public utility, at which point it becomes a fondation reconnue d’utilité publique. (Légifrance)
A FRUP also has significant capital and oversight requirements. The initial endowment must be at least €1.5 million, payable over up to ten years, and FRUPs must transmit board minutes, annual accounts, auditors’ reports, and activity reports to the competent prefectural authority. (Service Public)
3. Chronology and relationship
The French institutional phrase is much older and legally grounded; its modern statutory basis is 1987, with later refinements. The internet-sexual frup attestation I found is 2003. So, chronologically, the French legal usage precedes the English internet slang.
But the English slang does not appear to derive from French FRUP. Its stated derivation is from fruit rollup, not from fondation reconnue d’utilité publique. Likewise, the French acronym does not derive from English slang. The relation is best described as:
same letters, different language system, different semantic field, no demonstrable etymological connection.
Even phonetically they need not coincide. English frup would likely be /frʌp/ or /frʊp/. French FRUP might be read as letters, F-R-U-P, or acronymically closer to /fʁyp/, with French u. So the overlap is mostly visual.
4. Rhetorical implication for your FRUP project
For a serious French public-benefit foundation proposal, FRUP remains the correct administrative shorthand, but in English-language or satirical contexts it may look faintly comic because it resembles internet gibberish and has one obscure sexual-slang attestation. That does not make it unusable. It simply means that, on public-facing material, it is better to write:
FRUP — Fondation Reconnue d’Utilité Publique
or
a French public-utility foundation
rather than leaving FRUP unexplained.