Which will render as $\texttt{a\^{ }b}$. It tricks MathJax into putting the caret over the space (between the curly braces).
But if you're just looking for a way of having a block of inline text to have some subtle visual separation/standout I can do that. Would you want the text block to disable other BBCode like the [text] block? If so, I could add an attribute to the [text] block, like [text=pop] to add a subtle border, padding, and maybe a slightly different background.
