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Journalism of Courage
By Callie Holtermann
The conversation might go something like this. You’ll be informed that it doesn’t have a definition — it’s just funny, OK? And also, isn’t it a little bit embarrassing that you’re asking?
“There’s not really a meaning behind 6-7,” explained Ashlyn Sumpter, 10, who lives in Indiana. “I would just use it randomly,” said Carter Levy, 9, of Loganville, Georgia. Dylan Goodman, 16, of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, described the phrase as an inside joke that gets funnier with each grown-up who tries and fails to understand it.
“No offense to adults, but I think they always want to know what’s going on,” she said.
They have certainly been trying. Several months after “6-7” began popping up in classrooms and online, the phrase has become the subject of perplexed social media posts by parents and dutiful explainers in national news outlets, most of which trace it to the song “Doot Doot (6 7)” by rapper Skrilla. Last month, Dictionary.com chose the term as its word of the year, acknowledging it as “impossible to define.”
This is the oldest trick in the adolescent handbook: Say something silly, stump adults, repeat until maturity. Today, though, such terms ricochet around a network of publications and on the pages of influencers, all promising to decipher youth behavior for older audiences. “Six-seven” feels a bit like a nonsense grenade lobbed at the heart of that ecosystem. Desperate to understand us? Good luck, losers!
It is not the only way that younger generations are, consciously or not, scrambling the Very Earnest analysis of their forebears.
In the past couple of years, tweens were arbitrarily plopping “skibidi” into the middle of their sentences and using artificial intelligence to invent absurdist characters like Ballerina Cappuccina (a coffee cup with pointe shoes) and Tralalero Tralala (a shark with human legs). In Europe, thousands of members of Gen Z have embraced a ritual called “Pudding mit Gabel”: meeting up in a park, for no discernible reason, to eat pudding with forks.
These trends can get written off as twaddle or, in modern parlance, as brain rot. But perhaps they are something else: a kind of gleeful obfuscation, an effort to be unknowable by a generation that has, virtually since birth, been relentlessly on display.
“I think they kind of know that everyone is watching them,” said Alma Fabiani, 29, the head of content at the youth-focused digital publisher Screenshot. Isn’t it more fun — and more enigmatic — to turn the joke around on the people looking?
‘Swingin’ on the Flippity-Flop’
For as long as there has been teen slang, there has been a desire for adults to penetrate its meaning — and an impish urge among young people to exploit their curiosity. It’s practically a rite of passage.
In November 1992, The New York Times published a “lexicon of grunge speak” quoting Megan Jasper, a 25-year-old sales representative at Caroline Records in Seattle. After the article was published, Jasper revealed that she had made up several of her contributions, including “lamestain” (an uncool person) and “swingin’ on the flippity-flop” (hanging out).
The paper’s eagerness to write up a loose scene’s nonexistent lingo had inspired Jasper to go rogue. “You react by trying to make fun of it,” she later said.
When it came time to needle Gen X, Jasper’s generation, millennials had a tool that had not been available to their parents: the internet.
Clarissa Hunnicutt remembers endlessly repeating phrases including “I’m a snake,” a line from a viral YouTube video from 2010, to her parents’ bafflement and frustration.
“They finally just got to this point where they were like, ‘We’re going to accept that we have no clue what you are talking about,’” said Hunnicutt, 32, who works for a nonprofit foster-care agency.
She thinks that millennial parents like herself have struggled to do the same. Because she grew up steeped in internet culture, she feels that she should be able to get to the bottom of slang like “cooked” and “rizz” that her three children are learning online. In her day, most buzzy terms alluded to a single YouTube video or movie; now, the origins can be a lot more diffuse.
Algorithm-driven social media platforms have also sent the natural cycle of slang formation into overdrive. In the ceaseless search for novel material to feed users, those platforms elevate new trends and coinages at a rate that can be exhausting for those trying to keep up.
“I’ve put so much time into studying these words,” Hunnicutt said, laughing with exasperation.
Ashlyn, her 10-year-old daughter, sat next to her with a small grin. “I think it’s funny that she’s really, like, trying to get all of these words into her brain,” she said.
Parents like Hunnicutt can consult a booming content economy that dissects youth trends for curious adults and marketers.
Take “chopped,” a synonym for unattractive that was covered by the Times, Fox News and Parents.com, and appeared in newsletters including The Culture Translator and After School.
Some with particular proximity to young people — like middle-school teachers and parents — have also made careers of explaining what, exactly, kids mean when they say they are “aura farming.”
If today’s adults seem more anxious to have such terms elucidated for them, that may be because platforms like TikTok have provided unusual visibility into teenagers’ habits.
“There’s so much breathless interest in youth culture, myself included,” said Casey Lewis, who writes After School, a newsletter about Gen Z and Gen Alpha. “And so it’s fun to frustrate the olds.”
Lewis, 38, wondered whether “6-7” was a bit of a message to the adults who appear nosier than ever: “Let us exist in our own space,” she said.
‘None of Your Business’
As a middle schooler, Violet Paull remembers being peeved when she saw a YouTube video in which an adult man tried to explain a favorite archetype of hers, the scrunchie-wearing, water-bottle-carrying “VSCO girl.” (The trend was named for a photo-editing app that Paull used religiously.)
“I was like, it’s none of your business — you’re not a 13-year-old girl,” she said.
To be sure, members of Paull’s generation have also provided plenty of raw material for observers to wonder about, by posting through their upbringings and trying on different identities online. Still, there is a sense among her peers that perhaps they have already been parsed enough.
Now a 19-year-old college student in Annapolis, Maryland, Paull thinks that her generation’s in-jokes may have gotten more abstract in an effort to reveal less online, and perhaps to prolong the period of time that those jokes actually belong to the cohort that created them.
She pointed to a genre of brain rot that is “so ridiculously not funny that it kind of becomes funny.” Much of it makes no effort to be legible: One meme that circulated last year featured the text “that feeling when knee surgery is tomorrow,” layered over a blue-tinted image of the Grinch.
This is the kind of post that frequently circulates among Gen Z: surreal, impersonal and basically impenetrable. It is probably blurry, possibly upside-down. It might incorporate an animated movie, a six-month-old snippet of TikTok audio and an Instagram filter from 2010 all in the same post.
Kristen Choi, 22, was at a loss when her well-meaning father asked her to explain the origin of Ballerina Cappuccina, the AI-generated dancer. “I don’t think my dad would understand, even if I gave him a flow chart or, God forbid, a slide deck,” she said.
She sees these reality-defying characters as a way of coping with coming of age in a world that is less straightforward than she and her friends had hoped, as many of them struggle to find jobs and think of long-term goals like homeownership as elusive.
Choi, a recent college graduate in the San Francisco Bay Area, described her generation’s sense of humor as “copium,” a portmanteau of “cope” and “opium” — that is, disorienting and a bit of a narcotic at the same time.
Gen Alpha, the generation below Gen Z, seems to already be embracing, and amplifying, that attitude, according to Fabiani of Screenshot. Adults tend to treat young people “like a riddle that needs solving,” she said. But that may prove to be a self-defeating task.
When parents, teachers and “The Today Show” co-host Savannah Guthrie pulled on their “6-7” costumes last week for Halloween — perhaps satisfied that they were at last in on the joke — these adults were probably already behind the ball on an even newer bit of slang.
Lexie Frensley, 37, a middle-school teacher in Beaverton, Oregon, predicted the next “6-7” was already on its way.
“They have to go on to the next thing,” she said, adding: “It’s not going to stop.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
