A six-panel comic from 19 September 2014 did something very few pieces of art manage: it named a behaviour so precisely that the name stuck to it permanently.

In David Malki's Wondermark strip #1062, a woman remarks that she doesn't care for sea lions. A sea lion appears. It asks, politely, what she has against sea lions. It follows her. It is still there at dinner. It is there in her bedroom, at night, saying it only wants a reasoned discussion, and noting that it has been unfailingly polite throughout.

Every element of the tactic is in that strip, and the crucial one is the politeness. Sealioning is not rudeness. It is the weaponisation of manners — the performance of reasonable inquiry maintained past the point of any reasonable purpose, so that the target's inevitable exhaustion can be presented as their failure of civility.

Which is why the exit move is always the same: why are you being so hostile? I only asked a question.

Two clarifications matter, and both cut against lazy use of the word.

Malki has been explicit that the target is a behaviour, not an identity — the sea lion is a conduct pattern, deliberately not an analogy to prejudice based on fixed traits.

And: asking for a source is not sealioning. The defining feature is persistence past answers already given, plus the performed civility. One good-faith request for evidence is a normal thing to make of a stranger's claim, and calling it sealioning is a convenient way to avoid a fair question. The tell is not the first question. It is the fourth, arriving after the third was answered.

One detail says something about how internet language forms. Malki drew the comic. He did not coin the verb. Readers did — the word was assembled collectively out of a picture, which is roughly how most internet vocabulary now arrives.