Content-Type: text/shitpost

[ The following is ill-informed speculation. ]

I think that in some dialects of American English, “well” is sometimes pronounced with a final glottal stop, /wɛlʔ/. People wanted to represent this pronunciation in writing, but they couldn't, because English doesn't have a way to write a glottal stop, so instead they started to write it instead as “welp”. Once that spelling had been written and read enough times, people actually started to pronounce it /wɛlp̚/ or /wɛlp/.

Bonus question: if any of this is correct, why is it spelled “welp” and not “welk”?