keelhauling

When a question is posed to the internet at large, not to anyone in particular, and people chime in to say that they don't know the answer. Especially prevalent on technical forums and Amazon Questions, where any given "Does anyone know how to..." will feature many people inexplicably chiming in just to say no, they don't know.

Bonus points if the person is replying with hostility, suggesting that one should not want to know, or to say that they know for a fact it can't be done; triple word score if they say it can't be done, then someone else explains how to do it. Home run if they continue to insist it can't be done after that.

The etymology of this usage refers back to a StackExchange thread where a user asked if the maritime punishment of keelhauling was ever actually historically practiced. Many users replied to say "I don't know" in elaborate ways, often quoting Wikipedia back at the original user, as if he had no access to it himself. In the end, the user did some original research and determined that no, it probably wasn't real. All of the replies were keelhauling.

"Hey, can you get Warcraft 2 running on Windows 10?"
"I've never tried, but lol @ playing Warcraft 2 in 2019. It's real Starcraft hours baybeee!"
"yeah dude okay thanks been fully a week since I had a keelhauling like that but does anyone, like, know?"

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