Not since 69 has a number caused so much disruption.
“6-7”, pronounced “six seventeen“, haunts school halls across the country (including South Park Elementary), making it the Generation Alpha nonsense phrase of the moment. Kids shout it in classrooms when a teacher turns to page 67 when lunchtime is 6-7 minutes away or for no reason at all.
“It’s like a plague, a virus that has taken over the minds of these kids,” said Gabe Dannenbring, a seventh-grade science teacher in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. “You can’t say one iteration of the numbers 6 or 7 without at least 15 kids shouting ‘6-7!’ »
It’s a joke with no punchline (or setup, for that matter). 6-7 doesn’t mean anything, but using it can make a student feel like a member of a bigger, cooler group of their peers.
“It becomes a language game for them that it seems only people in their group know how to play,” said Gail Fairhurst, a University of Cincinnati professor who teaches leadership communication (and Generation Alpha speaks).
Skibidi’s toilets and rizz come and go. 6-7 is probably soon destined for the slang graveyard, now that adults talk about it so much. But there is something almost profound in its infinite interpretations, in its refusal to be defined.
“I think that’s part of what bothers people, and I think that’s part of what people like,” said Taylor Jones, a linguist and social scientist.
There may not be a coherent explanation for 6-7, but here we go: The number appears in the chorus of “Doot Doot (6 7),” a viral song by Philadelphia rapper Skrilla. (In Skrilla’s case, Jones says, 6-7 is likely a reference to police code 10-67, which is often used to report a death.)
In December 2024, around the same time that “Doot Doot” was starting to take off, high school basketball phenom Taylen Kinney appeared to create a gesture to accompany the phrase. In a clip shared by his Overtime Elite team, Kinney’s teammate asks him to rate a Starbucks drink out of 10.
“Like a 6…6…6-7,” he said, adding an indecisive gesture, as if weighing two options in his palms.
Soon after, Kinney began incorporating the song and gesture into his TikToks, where he has over a million followers.
The song began appearing in sports highlights, including those of Charlotte Hornets point guard LaMelo Ball. (He’s 6-foot-7, of course.) Ball doesn’t seem bothered by the memes yet, but the NBA season hasn’t officially started, so there’s still time.
A face of 6-7 emerged in March, when a video captured an excited young spectator at an amateur basketball game shouting “6-7!” with the accompanying hand gesture. He has become the embodiment of that annoying classmate who keeps spouting nonsense sentences. Somehow, the internet decided that this stereotype’s name was Mason — and thus, Mason 67 became another inside joke. (This “Mason” character has since become an icon of analog horror online, according to Know Your Meme, but that’s another story.)
So if a child uses any of the above explanations when you ask them what 6-7 is, they are probably right. But most kids don’t even know where it comes from, Dannenbring said.
“Nobody knows what that means,” he said. “And that’s kind of what’s funny about it.”
Its lack of meaning is partly due to what Jones calls “semantic whitening,” where a phrase is separated from its original context and comes to mean something completely different (or, in this case, nothing).
Using 6-7 comes down to wanting to have fun, Jones said: “Do you have a little fancy? Or are you a party animal?”
Of course, this makes no sense, but 6-7 serves an essential social function. It’s a shibboleth, or a phrase that means you belong to an “in” group, Jones said. People who don’t say it or don’t understand it are excluded. And what kid doesn’t want to be a part of that?
“Language is a way for people to form community,” Fairhurst said. “Even though it’s a nonsense term, if they seem to know what it means, it can be a unifying force. And if someone doesn’t understand the term, it can also exclude people from that community.”
6-7 has also survived longer than other nonsense words on the Internet — even that pesky “skibidi” — probably because “adults are so angry about it,” Jones said.
“The fact that you can get a big reaction from someone for something that makes absolutely no sense — that might give it a longer longevity than it otherwise would have had,” Jones said.
Fed up teachers ban it from their classes or make exasperated TikToks about how many times they’ve heard it in a single school day (for Dannenbring, the record is 75). Shouting “6-7!” ” Once it’s banned, it becomes a “way of showing resistance,” Fairhurst said.
The teachers now play defense using the 6-7 themselves. A Michigan middle school choir teacher was able to stave off cries of “6-7” by incorporating it into a warm-up song that also includes “slay,” “Ohio” and “rizz.”
“Don’t yell at me… even if you’re excited,” the teacher implores her class before beginning to chant “6-7, 6-7, 6-7, skibidi,” a chorus of squeaky little cherubs.
By asking his students to open their textbook to page 67, Dannenbring suddenly adopts the tone of his enthusiastic seventh graders, who immediately protest against their teacher using a phrase that does not belong to him. (At 27, Dannenbring is an older member of Generation Z. But a young teacher is a teacher and, therefore, too old to play.)
“If you don’t participate, yes, it’s very disruptive,” Dannenbring said. “If you recognize it, it will be over in about 15 seconds.”
What if that doesn’t stop the conversation, he said he was intentionally using it incorrectly: “It’s so 6-7 of you. »
“The easiest way to kill it is for teachers to say it’s cool,” Jones said.
Comedian Josh Pray began using it in front of his children, incorporating it into his videos, desperate to reclaim a once-harmless number.
“I’m trying to get our numbers!” » he said. “I’ll be 67 before they know it, and I don’t want to hear that specific tone all around me as a mockery of my age!”
Fear not, parents, constantly shouting “6-7!” » This is not enough to prove that your children are “brain rotting”. Concerns about declining literacy and diminishing critical thinking skills are legitimate, but they are “projected onto normal, youthful behavior,” Jones said.
“We are rewriting our own history,” Jones said. “This is not a new phenomenon at all. »
Each generation invents its own slang, and language evolves in ways that most of us will never consciously perceive, Jones said. Kids will always come up with cool new phrases (like “cool”!), and adults will scratch their heads in confusion.
Nonsense phrases like this aren’t inherently harmful, and 6-7 certainly isn’t going to bring about the end of the English language, Fairhurst said. But its popularity could be a benign symptom of our “post-truth” society, she said, where the meaning and specificity of communication matter less than people’s interpretation of it.
“It seems to be a kind of kinship with this kind of phenomenon, where we just use language for the sake of using language, and not because we see anything particularly meaningful or particularly real about it,” she said.
Maybe 6-7 is already on its way out – it has survived for almost a year, essentially a century in the days of TikTok. Some Dannenbring students start rolling their eyes when they hear their classmates shout it. Philip Lindsay, a middle school teacher and comedian, said he’s already hearing potential replacements in his class — “41,” for one, another equally meaningless number that makes kids laugh inexplicably.
“41 were thrown in an attempt to dethrone the 6-7,” Lindsay said. “6-7 just happened. 41 was pushed.”
According to Dannenbring, slang can be much worse than 6-7. Past trends have had students inserting pencils into their school-issued laptops to set them on fire or ripping sinks straight from the walls of their school bathrooms.
“We have heard these words before, like toilets in Skibidi,” he said. “This one is significantly less boring.