Hi, English isn’t my mother tongue so I was asking myself that question since I first encounted a w/… Back then I was like: “What tf does ‘w slash’ stand for?” And when I found out I was like “How, why, and is it any intuitive?” But I never dared to ask that until now
Oh… I see, so it’s the word for fish.
It would be like if we had an acronym F.I.S.H. and some people got cute and drew a 🐟 instead of writing F.I.S.H.