Go away troll

Most language-related internet fads I'm not crazy about. I can't stand smileys and their relations; some of the abbreviations (e.g., WTF) are efficient and useful, even if they don't inspire enthusiasm; catchphrases (All Your Base) quickly wear out their welcome. But there's one recent innovation (at least, I think it's recent—see below) that I absolutely love. For, oh, the past year or so I've been noticing, and when appropriate using, a delightful... what to call it? It's not an exclamation, because it's determinedly low-key; it's not really an interjection, because it's not interjected, it's a standalone response. And I wasn't sure how to find an example, because it's impossible to search for (see below). But I trusted to serendipity, which rarely fails me, and sure enough fate provided one. My wife and I were listening to This American Life, and the second part of the episode involved the insufficient response of the chairman of the SEC to the current financial meltdown (which is an odd subject for TAL, but never mind that). The host, Ira Glass, started out by explaining the recondite (to most of us) concept of the naked short. Short selling is a familiar enough concept if you know anything about the stock market; you think a stock is going to go down, so you borrow a bunch of shares, sell them, then buy them back (at a lower price, if you've guessed correctly) just before you have to return them, having made a bundle. Naked short selling, Ira said, is just the same, except you don't borrow the stocks first. To which I could think of only one response:

what

This is not a "What!" of outrage, or a "What?" of inquiry. Unlike those standard forms, it does not represent a spoken version; it is a purely written (and, so far as I know, online) phenomenon. It uses and distorts the conventions of writing to produce the equivalent of a slack-jawed stare of bafflement; it is always written just as it is above, lower-case, no punctuation, on a line of its own. It is a response to something so out of left field, so incomprehensible, that nothing coherent can be said about it. I find it hilarious and addictive, and I am not the only one. I would love to know where it came from and when it was created and by whom.

But how can you investigate it? It's one of the commonest words in English, there's no distinctive context, and there's no way to search for its features (as far as I know). If lexical invention were against the law, this would be the perfect crime; like an ice dagger that melts in the victim's body, it leaves nothing for the detective to work with. I leave it as a challenge for the clever folks at the Log; if anyone can figure out a way to get a handle on it, they can.