All across the country, clueless fathers are asking their tweens and teens the same question: “What is ‘Six Seven’?” This question is being met with gales of laughter and an identical response: “It doesn’t mean anything, Dad ” — the emphasis on that title, which not so long ago was wreathed with the sweet breath of filial affection, serving to punctuate their scorn. “No, really,” the especially dense father might persist. “It has to mean something!” More delighted laughter, more eye-rolling at this supreme display of parental idiocy. “It’s just ‘Six Seven,’” they say, moving their hands like they’re juggling an invisible ball.
Since at least the spring, “Six Seven” has been the bane of middle-school classrooms, a social-media-fueled wildfire that has burned without abating. One teacher in Texas told The Wall Street Journal, “If you’re like, ‘Hey, you need to do questions six, seven,’ they just immediately start yelling, ‘Six Seven!’” On the r/Teachers sub-Reddit, under the subject line “WTF is 6 7??,” dozens of users suggest strategies for how teachers can deal with the scourge, including making the trend “cringe” by saying “Six Seven” themselves or, my personal favorite, singing the chorus of “867-5309/Jenny,” by Tommy Tutone. Since their children are no help, parents have been turning to overstimulating explainer videos on TikTok for answers, a parasitic trend that is only slightly less grating than “Six Seven” itself.
And it is ubiquitous. A colleague of mine said that, for a recent book report, her son had chosen the title I Survived the Attack of the Grizzlies, 1967: The Graphic Novel. Another wrote in Slack, “Can you imagine my 10-year-old’s reaction when I told him the weather report today was a high of 67?” A recent episode of South Park featured Peter Thiel cracking down on a “cult involving the numbers six and seven” after students shouted the numbers at him.
Most children likely don’t know that the purported origin of “Six Seven” is the song “Doot Doot (6 7),” by rapper Skrilla, which has been featured in viral videos of the NBA’s LaMelo Ball, who is six-foot-seven. Some say kids are using “Six Seven” to suggest something is “so-so”; others darkly hint that it has a sexual connotation that is a riff on “69.” But most kids are not referring to anything at all, which makes “Six Seven” different from slang words of the past that at least had some connection to a concept, an action, a thing. “Six Seven” is a linguistic cypher, online flotsam with no significance whatsoever.
This seems like cause for concern: Shouldn’t we be worried that our children are speaking literal nonsense? Is my 11-year-old daughter going to forget that words are supposed to have meaning? I’d argue the meaning of “Six Seven” lies precisely in its non-meaning — in the bafflement it causes in adults, in the circle it draws separating children from their parents and teachers. “Six Seven” distills slang to its essence, stripping it of any function but to create for a discrete group a world of its own. Most parents on some level understand that this is healthy and normal, yet it rubs against the often unconscious drive to make our children just like ourselves. This may be the real reason “Six Seven” is so irritating.
Modifying language has always been a means for kids to assert group dynamics. When I was in high school, we would speak in a dumb stoner code in which the words for certain contraband substances and activities were said backward: reeb for “beer,” ekoms for “smoke,” gnob for “bong,” etc. (Well into his college years, my little brother’s email address was [email protected].) The ostensible point was to be able to discuss such things in public without getting busted. But we used these words all the time, even when no adults were around, both because we thought this system was exceedingly clever and because it forged the sense that we, as a posse, were distinct, special.
“Six Seven,” being largely a middle-school phenomenon, serves a slightly different purpose consistent with that age’s awkward transitional quality: These kids are no longer wholly innocent, but they are not quite sullen adolescents, either. You may (rightly) think our backward-words ruse was laughably rudimentary, but as far as I know, none of our parents cracked the code or even knew it existed. “Six Seven,” by contrast, is giddily flung in the faces of parents and teachers, designed to underscore just how out of touch they are. These are kids, in other words, who are still dependent on their elders for affirmation, even if that affirmation is expressed in total bewilderment. One reason WNBA star Paige Bueckers went viral for dropping a “Six Seven” reference at a press conference — “I’ve been here five years, but it’s felt more like six, seven” — is the gulf between her bursting out laughing and the nonplussed response of the gathered journalists.
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There will be a time, soon, when my daughter won’t take any pleasure from goading me with the newfangled ways her peers talk. Already there are signs of a secret life that is only getting deeper and more complex: illicit candy wrappers found in the wash; lies that she is not yet sophisticated enough to make convincing; longer and longer periods behind the closed door of her room, the chrysalis from which one day she will emerge as her adult self. When she talks about “Six Seven,” it’s often in reference to the Boys who disrupt class with their high jinks — the Boys who remain on the periphery of her social consciousness but are fast encroaching. For now, she still wants me to be aware of her life’s various facets, still wants me to play The Legend of Zelda with her, still slips her hand into mine as we walk down the street, seemingly with no premonition that she is on the cusp of finding all this unbearably embarrassing.
When I told her I was writing this article, she was mortified and coolly informed me that “Six Seven” was already getting “side eye” in class for being played out and obnoxious. Grown-ups have a way of ruining everything, though this is a particular challenge for a generation that has to contend with adult influencers adorning their designer handbags with Labubus and middle-aged political pundits making po-faced critiques of the new Taylor Swift album.
The question of whether adults will let their children make a world of their own is the inadvertent moral of Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, One Battle After Another, a rollicking, often virtuosic story about left-wing radicalism in a time of rising fascism. As a movie about parenting, however, it’s a disaster. Leonardo DiCaprio plays what we in the parenting community call a “girl dad,” a devoted, fiercely protective father of a teenage daughter named Willa (played by Chase Infiniti). She was abandoned by her mother, who, along with DiCaprio’s character, was a member of the militant group the French 75, which, like the Weather Underground, bombed banks and other buildings in the name of political freedom. (The movie is loosely based on Vineland, by Thomas Pynchon, a writer who knows a thing or two about how words and symbols can foster imagined communities of like-minded thought and feeling, even if those words and symbols may ultimately mean nothing.) Just as Willa begins to embark on her own, setting off for a school dance with her pals, her parents’ shenanigans rush up from the distant past and overwhelm her, thrusting her into a madcap struggle between weed-smoking revolutionaries and their white-nationalist oppressors. She adopts her parents’ ways (the way of the gun). She learns their ancient code words instead of inventing her own. In the ultraviolent crucible of the struggle against state tyranny, she comes of age. The movie concludes with her forgiving both her mother and her father for their sins and driving to a protest in Oakland as Tom Petty’s “American Girl” blasts on the soundtrack.
Essentially, she becomes her parents. Though Anderson is a Gen-Xer, this is a classic fantasy of the boomers, the conceit being that they are so much at the center of history that their descendants will carry on their battles for them until the revolution is won. But one of the most important things you learn about getting old — about not understanding concepts like “Six Seven,” no matter how inane — is that one day the world will no longer belong to us. It will belong to them.
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