Every once in a while journalists turn their beady eyes on the ever-fresh topic of “how those crazy kids are talking these days” and make solemn efforts to decipher it; the latest entry, by Callie Holtermann in the NY Times (archived), is less solemn and more sensible than most, and it includes an admirable bit of institutional self-flagellation (the passage beginning “In November 1992”):
If you’d like to truly mortify yourself in front of a young person, try asking the meaning of a phrase that’s being repeated in schools around the country like an incantation: “6-7.”
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, Ga. Dylan Goodman, 16, of Bucks County, Pa., 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 the 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.
She goes on to talk about skibidi, Ballerina Cappuccina, Tralalero Tralala (a shark with human legs), and “Pudding mit Gabel” before continuing:
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, Ms. 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 Ms. Jasper to go rogue. “You react by trying to make fun of it,” she later said.
When it came time to needle Gen X, Ms. 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 Ms. 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.
There’s a lot more in the article; click through and enjoy. Thanks, Trevor!
Badger badger badger badger
Say, you got some real moxie, buddy, but that jive is for the birds, dig?
Edepol!
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
BTW, Megan Jasper is now CEO of Sub Pop Records. The moral is, kids, you should disrespect your elders.
Bloomquist writes like somebody who once bearded Tim Leary in a campus cocktail lounge and paid for all the drinks.
Harsh …(tee hee) …
I have long since made it clear to my children that I transcend arbitrary categories of cool. They nod and smile quietly in evident agreement when I do this.
The moral is, kids, you should disrespect your elders.
Now you’re talkin’!
2010??? It’s 2003, where are the factcheckers 🙄
23 skidoo!
@F The video version of the original Flash animation wasn’t uploaded onto YouTube until 2008. It’s conceivable it took until 2010 for its YouTube incarnation to go viral.
But as far as Hunnicutt’s age goes the behavior described surely makes more sense for 2003 or 2004 like when everybody else knew the song.
In Russian (= old Soviet) joke telling culture (called natively anecdotes) there was a joke that all jokes were numbered and now people should just say a number aloud and laugh.
https://crumbproducts.com/products/mr-natural-2-giclee-print-1?srsltid=AfmBOor5AK0RD7jzKcXfiC8Xb2NbEE4J7eDMp8PXGnu8g_-nYdYqfU0I
Mr. Natural is, of course, the ultimate authority.
@DO:
Dave Allen had a variant of this:
A man visits a monastery.
Outside, he finds a number of monks sitting about relaxing.
“Forty-two”, says one.
The rest all burst out laughing.
“Three hundred and six”, says another.
“Oh, a bit risky”, says another, as they all snigger.
The visitor asks what’s going on.
“Oh, we’ve been here for decades. We long since learnt all of one another’s jokes. So we’ve numbered them, and now we just need to say the numbers.”
“OK”, says the visitor. “Let me try. A hundred and four!”
No response.
“Fifty-seven!”
Nothing.
Gently, the first monk says “it’s the way that you tell them.”
According to my kids, 6-7 did have a meaning two months ago, but it blew up too fast. Kids that knew the meaning would arch their eyebrows knowingly at a license plate with the numbers in sequence, or jersey #67 on their AYSO team. Every situation offered a potential reference, but a meaningless one. That fueled the spread but debased the value at the same time.
Kids like Carter and Dylan had already heard it too many times, grew bored with it and started using it quotatively as a joke before they even caught the meaning.
As a result, 6-7 hasn’t been Group 7 for weeks.
@do
Are you thinking of this joke? We have this in English also.
https://www.anekdot.ru/id/982160/
EDIT: Ninja’d by DE
Forget Norway.
But the snake from the badgers (which no one is except itself) is different from this, which I’ve never seen before.
Another variation: one goes up and calls “seventy-two”. Everyone laughs heartily, but the one by the visitor is gasping and doubled over with laughter, tears streaming from his eyes. Finally he manages to explain: “My God… it’s so good… I never heard that one before.”
Despite the excellent work of e.g. Ben Zimmer, I feel that Megan Jasper may remain the greatest lexicographer of our generation.
I wonder if that joke has the record for same premise with the most punch lines.
There is another version where a man drops by a neighborhood bar. Same premise – the regulars have been telling the same jokes so long they are all numbered.
The man wants to try. “what about 78?” Everyone guffaws.
“95!”
Everyone stares at him, shocked. The man next to him punches him in the jaw.
“Are you some kind of sicko? There’s a lady present!”
@Jen:
Quite so. I confused the issue with my spontaneous badgering (that was before I looked at the actual article.)
The “I’m a snake” version seems to me to lack the stark existential purity of the badger video. But then, I am from the Past. We did things differently there.
Another punchline to the numbered jokes story is that someone says “104” and everyone laughs even more uproariously, slaps their knees, collapses to the floor, etc etc. The innocent bystander asks why that one caused such a reaction. Oh, he’s told, that’s a new one, we hadn’t heard it before….
i recall a whole summer where “ya know, right?” was the ruling non-referential catch-phrase – no idea how widespread that was, or even whether it had an nyc or boston-area origin.
not to mention “i’m on a boat!”.
the numbered-jokes genre got even funnier to me after i started spending time with shape-note singers, who generally call songs by number rather than name (i favor 117* and 268**, among others) – which is in the process of getting much more complicated, because The Sacred Harp has a new edition for the first time since 1991.
.
* Babylon Is Fallen (lively, with a particularly punchy chorus)
** David’s Lamentation (an anthem with extra-tasty harmonies)
My God, have any of you clicked through to the NYT piece from 1992? The very first line (archived) contains a ridiculous counting error!
WHEN did grunge become grunge? How did a five-letter word meaning dirt, filth, trash become synonymous with a musical genre, a fashion statement, a pop phenomenon?
1992 was, according to The Grey/Gray Lady, The Year of the Fact Checquer.
ETA: They misspelled grundge.
Like more or less every Youth Word of the Year collected by the Duden…
Though it may be foolish to comment on 6-7, might it have been influenced by, and a modification of, “six of one, half a dozen of another”?
Or a commentary on Genesis.
Doot, Doot,
Six days of creation, seventh, rest.
When I looked for it a few months ago, it was said to derive from praise for a basketball player who was shorter but played like he was 6’ 7”. I can’t actually find that version now.
It made me think of the Liz Phair song
And I kept standing 6’1″
Instead of 5’2″
And I loved my life
And I hated you
Great song — I haven’t listened to that album in years, and I should.
Random thought, triggered by a kid yelling out of a car waiting outside a local takeaway ‘do you know what 6-7 means’?
Amongst IE languages, the translations for Six-Seven sound plausibly similar, as you’d expect. And have impeccable PIE etymologies.
But no more similar than Hebrew שש, שבע. (Same number of syllables, starting with fricative/sibilants, שש ending with a sibiliant, שבע same middle consonant as English or German depending which variant of Hebrew.) The Hebrew words seem to have impeccable Proto-Semitic etymologies. No other Hebrew numerals sound close to SAE, as you’d expect.
Coincidence? A commentary on Genesis, per SG?
More AI Overview bollocks:
There is an opinion that “seven” is a wanderwort, because Magical Prime and all that.
Not a direct claim to be a Semitic loan, but I saw a thing the other day pointing out that the number seven was important in religion and magic “in the region”, maybe even before PIE had bona fide numbers up to six. So a good candidate for borrowing from some culture with better religion/magic chops? I know too little about Sumerian or Very Old Chinese to evaluate the claim, but of the languages we know existed it would almost have to be one of them. (Something something *-ptm is also pretty much an outlier in PIE phonotactics, did it have more vowels at some stage? Like when PIE speakers felt the need to use the number in rituals? I know *m is a vowel, but not all donor languages necessarily agree).
Kusaal (a)yɔpɔi “seven” is a compound/fusion/whatever of the stem of (a)yuobʋ “six” with an element which appears by itself in (m)pɔi “seven” (in counting) and as mpɛ “seven” in the fairly distantly related Grusi language Kasem. So: six-seven.
Welsh saith “seven” looks unproblematic as a reflex of PIE, until you realise that it is the only word in Brythonic where PIE initial *s has not become /h/.
Sure; the origin of the zero grade really seems to be the loss of unstressed vowels. And then the stress shifted to the vowelless final syllable because “8” has final stress, or at least that’s the only hypothesis people have come up with to explain that puzzling fact.
There was a lengthy discussion here last year of “seven” and “six” as wanderworts, starting here.
Thank you @kts, I remembered the ‘honey’ discussion, but had clean forgot about the numerals.
So hunter-gatherers need count only up to five, a hand. Even if we can explain borrowed six-seven for trading/accounting and magic, that doesn’t explain why not borrow eight-nine.
@de
Re s instead of h in saith:
Tbis is not unique, although untypical:
Matasovic has Proto-Celtic:
—
“*sextam ‘seven’ [Num] GOID: OIr. secht [+Nasalization] W: MW seith (GPC saith) …ETYM: Brittonic *s- instead of *h- is explained as the unlenited sandhi- variant (*s was not changed to *h after consonants).”
“*sil-n- (?) ‘look’ [Vb] GOID: Mir. sellaid, -sella ‘looks’ W: MW syllu ‘stare, gaze’ (GPC syllu, syllio)…. ETYM: All of these verbs are originally denominative…. For the initial *s- instead of *h- in Brittonic cf., e.g., *sextam ‘seven’ > MW seith. ”
For the e.g., here are
1. Forms in W ysg/p/c..
*sk w iyat- ‘hawthorn’ [Noun] GOID: OIr. see [d and k, f] ‘thorn bush, whitethorn’ W: OW ispidattenn
*skara- ‘divide, separate’ [Vb] GOID: Olr. scaraid, -scara ‘divides, separates’; scaraid, -scara [Subj.]; scarais, scar [Pret.] W: MW yscar, ysgar (GPC (y)sgaru, ysgar, ysgario, ysgarad)
*skamo- Tight’ [Adj] GOID: Mir. scam [o m] ‘lung’ (attested only in the plural, scaim) W: MW ysgafn Tight’ ; ysgefeint ‘lung’ (GPC ysgafn, ysgawn, ysgon )
*skato- ‘shadow’ [Noun] GOID: Olr. scath [o n] W: MW ysgawd [m] ‘shade, darkness’ {GPC ysgod)
*skek- ‘move, stir’ [Vb] GOID: OIr. scuichid, -scuichi ‘goes away’; sceiss, -see [Subj.]; scaich [Pret.] W: MW ysgogi ‘move, stir, tremble’ (GPC ysgogi, ysgog )
*skSto- ‘shield’ [Noun] GOID: OIr. sciath [o m] W : MW ysgwyd [f and m]
*skito- ‘tired’ [Adj] GOID: OIr. scith [o] ‘weary, tired’ W: MW escud, esgud (GPC esgud)
*skublo- ‘bird of prey’ [Noun] W: MW ysglyf[ m] (GPC ysglyf, ysglyff, ysgyfl, ysgylf)
2. additional forms
*saltro- ‘trampling’ [Noun] GOID: MIr. saltraid ‘tramples’ W: MW sathr [m] ‘trampling’
*seg-eto- ‘seed’ [Noun] W: OW segeticion [p] gl. prolis, MW se, he ‘scattering’
*serr3 ‘sickle’ [Noun] W: OW serr
… ETYM: For W s- instead of *h- cf. *sextam ‘seven > W seith. Some consider these Celtic forms to be loanwords from Lat. serra ‘saw’, but the meanings do not match, so it is at least equally possible that they are inherited…
*sowk-n-o- ‘suck’ [Vb] W: MW sugno ‘to suck, drink, suckle’
—
I am not able to understand M’s explanation, when i compare some similar forms where the reflex is h. Maybe some better explanation is available.
The idea is that *s did not become *h if it was preceded by a consonant, regardless of word boundaries, so many words must at one time have had two forms that were eventually sorted out, mostly toward the *h that the word had in isolation or after a vowel.
7 might be an exception that was leveled to *s because low numbers most often occur in counting – and, says Wiktionary, 6 ended in a consonant (all the way from PIE to the modern languages).
6 itself is not an exception. I guess that might be because 5 still ended in a vowel in Gaulish – the vowel was gone by Proto-Brythonic, but the *s > *h change seems to have been largely complete when the Romans showed up, while Proto-Brythonic was spoken shortly before they left; so there could have been a stage when “5, 6, 7” went *[pɛmpɛhwɛxs(ː)ɛtːa] or something like that.
One second too late: *[pɛmpɛhwɛxs(ː)ɛçta]. Or something.