I started this draft about a week before “6-7” was named word of the year by Dictionary.com. It’s not technically a word, but dictionary.com says it can mean “so-so” or “it’s complicated” but is basically one brain-rotty, meaningless inside joke. 

So, given the recent newsworthiness, I am going to assume you have heard about this kind of mass hysteria among American children saying “6-7” all the time with a weird, balancing-scales hand motion. There are endless social media videos of adults and teachers “decoding” it, or making fun of it, or coaching other teachers on how to deal with it in their classrooms. Yesterday I saw a video of a sports journalist being harassed by a group of boys six-seven-ing her as she was trying to do her job. I heard from my 8 year old it was a little kid thing, but these boys seem….older than that. 

Anyways, I’ve always been interested in mass culture – experiences that are shared by huge groups of people. There are less and less of these as media becomes more and more niche, but “6-7” seems to have transcended kid subculture, since its main implementation is happening in one of those funny places where people from different generations, cultural backgrounds, and niche audiences still share space on the regular: school. 

The lore of “6-7” is that the phrase comes from the Skrilla song “Doot Doot (6 7)” combined with video edits of NBA player LaMelo Ball who is 6’7”. These videos sort of went viral on TikTok, followed by a video of some random kid yelling “6-7” at a basketball game, and then everyone wanted to do it. Sort of like when Katy Perry and that backpack kid made flossing cool in 2017. 

I think that’s kind of boring, don’t you? 

When I was studying film and comparative literature in college, we used psychology, feminism, and different philosophies to decode a text. We weren’t necessarily interested in what the artist wanted to say. It was not like trying to figure out which ex-boyfriend Taylor Swift is singing about in her latest song. It’s more like digging through the imagery in her lyrics and videos to figure out how feminism informs and is re-formed by what she has to say. More fun, right? 

So, in that vein, I think “6-7” isn’t about what it means, it’s about what it does. 

It’s distracting, annoying, and it reshapes the conversation without actually adding anything to it. 

It seems like the perfect cultural phenomenon for this moment. 

If kids have been tuned into pop culture and political culture at all, or maybe just absorbing it through the adults in their life, what have they seen? Over the past five or so years they’ve seen us (not us: you and me; but, us: adults) screaming nonsense at each other in public places, acting like toddlers when we don’t get our way, calling each other names, listening to people bad mouth other people on TV and podcasts, and spending far too much time trolling on the internet. 

What have they learned from this? 6-7. 

“6-7” turns meaninglessness into a show. It can effectively hijack any conversation. It allows you to take up airspace by saying literally nothing. 

On the one hand I enjoy that it is a really subversive way that kids can assert their own power in any space. On the other hand, I wish they were actually having a real conversation. Because the problem with “6-7” is that since it could mean “literally anything” it takes whatever meaning you wish to convey (I’m bored, I don’t like you, I have a problem, I’m happy, I think my friends are awesome) and makes it completely unintelligible. And of course speaking the same language can build rapport; Dictionary.com called “6-7” a global inside joke with its meaning lying more in the sense of connection it creates. But what type of rapport is created when we both say the same thing but no one knows what it means beyond the confines of their own brain?

Youth slang has always partially been about excluding adults. With the internet to tell us olds about all of the new slang, this is getting harder and harder. But with “6-7”, the meaning will always be hidden to us. And anyone else who hears it, but that’s beside the point. 

I guess what I find both disturbing and fascinating about “6-7” is that this is a step beyond creating new words to convey shared ideas. “Hep” became “hip” and meant “in the know”, which it can be argued eventually evolved into “woke” which means different things depending who you ask. “Cool” meant “calm and collected”, and then just evolved into “stylish.” “Wicked” meant “very”, “Skibidi” meant “bad”, “Rizz” meant an “attractive personality”. These things were nuanced, but definable. 

“6-7” is like the slang that creates a niche just for you and your immediate group. While it’s a cultural signpost, it’s not giving you any specific direction. It creates camaraderie, but with no shared ideals. It could mean something in your head, and something completely different in your friend’s head, but you’re both laughing. It’s a reflection of the divisiveness of the moment in that it moves us nowhere, but then on the other hand, it rejects the notion that we need to believe in the same things to create connection. We don’t have to talk about politics and ideals. We can just sync up our hand motions and laugh at all the silly, cringe adults. 

So maybe “6-7” is a neutral place where kids can meet and actually re-make the art of conversation? Maybe there is hope after all.