(Photo by Haberdoedas via Unsplash)
I remember well my first father-son conversation about girlfriends because it soon devolved into an argument about slang.
“Why limit yourself to girls you only think at first glance are foxy?” he asked, substituting my straightforward description of “good looking.”
“Foxy girls are not the be-all-end-all,” he continued, substituting another of my terms, “all that.”
I smirked, and a little too condescendingly at that. “‘Foxy?!’” I asked with incredulity. “Dad, are we living in the seventies?!”
“Well, what is the word kids use these days?” he asked with a stern face. “I’m just trying to communicate with you so we can have a discussion that might solve your problem.”
As is so often the case, the “problem” of communication between parents and children is not just that tweens and teens experience altogether different problems than their parents, as how to word a text before hitting send. It is so often a simple matter of communicating at all. I had to scratch my head some two years ago when my teenage daughter used the word “rizz,” until some 20 minutes later it dawned on me as shorthand for “charisma.” But “rizz” is not just that, but also shorthand for skills in flirting, and skills pertaining to almost any subject beyond social skills, up to and including even STEM skills and chess.
The latest manifestation of slang driving older generations to head-scratching despair is “Six-seven!” As a simple numerical sequence, its universality is built in. It is mind-numbingly easy to remember, recite, and shout out. And although it gained momentum strong enough to crash the gates of the adolescent lexicon by combining the cultural cache of a rap track—Skrilla’s 2024 song “Doot Doot (67)—and sports reference—the 6-foot 7-inch height of Charlotte Hornets’ NBA basketball star and point guard LaMelo Ball—it means or signifies, basically, nothing at all except for the sounds emitted when spoken. In other words, “Six-seven” is perfect, iconic slang for an era when most words have long been strangled or suffocated into meaninglessness anyway.
Am I going over the top, or “OTT”? Kinda-sorta, but not really. Slang draws its myriad, juicy linguistic possibilities from existing words by twisting them only slightly into unfamiliarity while retaining familiarity. Almost like abstract works of art, we must stand alone in the presence of these terms until something decipherable emerges. Either they endure, as has “cool” for decades, or they grow slightly stale from overuse. “Awesome” is a great example of the latter, as nothing new has been added to its use in terms of meaning except the waning grandeur of its overuse.
Slang is those half-hidden words, code intended only for certain circles, or what our parents used to call “the in-crowd.” “Six-seven!” seems unique in that it has nothing to hide. Past slang involving numbers—the one-to-ten scale of physical attractiveness, the “Five-0” reference to police, the “4:20” signifier for a daily dose of cannabis—all had immediate or even urgent significance. “Six-seven,” by contrast, just sits in its own hollow existence, which is no doubt what makes it so vexing and annoying to middle school teachers forced to cope with it.
Aging Gen-Xer that I am, the first clue that came to mind upon learning about “Six-seven” was not Skrilla—no one my age would strain to act that young—but the Pixies’ 1989 indie-rock hit “Monkey Gone to Heaven.” One of the many “stonkin” (go ahead, look it up) anthems of my generation, the song played with numerology like few other stonking anthems before it. Songwriter and lyricist Francis Black, raised an Evangelical Christian before moving to secular Boston to form his band, went one numeral more than Krilla to assign not just meaning, but rage to numbers. Five was a stand-in for man. Six was the devil. God was, of course, seven.
Hence, every verse meant something for twenty-somethings raised in Christian denominations teaching that the Anti-Christ was not just one six, but three terrifying sixes in a row. The current rage of “Six-seven” is mercifully devoid of any damning significance. In an age where dread, danger, and derangement seem to lurk around every corner, and with every signifier prone to carry us into some lattice of conspiracy, maybe we need the joy of meaninglessness like never before.
