Is your child randomly saying “six seven” out of the blue? Congratulations! You have just met the latest piece of internet nonsense to sweep through British schools.
My son said it in the car a few weeks ago while poking yet another hole in his school unform, and I remember thinking it was weird, but it wasn’t until I had heard it a few more times that I asked why he was saying it.
“Everyone says it” he told me.
“Ok. But why?”
He looked confused. I looked confused.
“Why do you say six seven?” I asked again.
“Just because we want to.”
“But what does it mean?”
“It just means six seven.”
“Is it a joke?”
“No.”
“Is it something naughty?”
“No.”
“So what is it?”
“It’s just six seven.”
He wasn’t even trying to wind me up. To him, this all made perfect sense. To me it meant nothing, less than nothing. In fact, I was more bewildered than I was before I had asked.
I clearly wasn’t going to get any answers out of my 6 year old sheep of a son, so I went digging elsewhere. What I found was completely baffling.
It Started with Skrilla
It sounds like an oven cleaning product doesn’t it? But Skrilla is actually the name of an obscure American rapper. I’m saying he’s obscure, but he’s got hundreds of thousands of Insta followers and Youtube subscribers, which I believe gives him what the kids call ‘clout’ these days.
Anyway, in 2024, Skrilla releases a song called Doot Doot. It doesn’t have a melody or a chorus and I only understood about 15% of what he was saying, but nevertheless, he released this ‘song’, and in it, he says “6 7” a couple of times. Apparently in reference to 67th street in Philadelphia. So you can see why 6 year olds in Manchester are relating to it so well…
Bits of the song were being used in sports edits on social media, then, in one particular video, the commentator was talking about the height of an NBA player called LaMelo Ball, and guess how tall he was? You got it, he was “six seven”. Whoever made the video edited in that exact lyric from Skrilla’s song, and a meme was born.
Other people started doing it too, then it was applied to other sports, then to anything at all even if it wasn’t a sport, like this:
So now it had become a ‘thing’ and celebs started crowbarring it into interviews and gigs, like a sort of in joke. Natasha Bedingfield has been famously replacing her lyrics with 6 7 at concerts, for example. By this point 6 7 was impossible to contain. The virus is out and the only cure is exposure.
The 6 7 Hand Gesture
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Another twist in the tale of 6 7, is the hand gesture. You’ve probably seen it. The kids turn their palms up and sort of juggle thin air. Or weigh invisible bags of sweets.
This came from a younger basketball player called Taylen Kinney. This lad got hold of the six seven phrase and said it all the time. About everything. When he said it, he naturally made the hand gesture and it became the official unofficial accompaniment to saying ‘six seven’. Being a TikToker and an up and coming ball player, this spread like any other mind virus, and also gave followers of the cult a visual reference.
Kids could now say six seven without even saying six seven, which of course is hilarious in places like a school classroom when you have to be quiet but want to mess around with your friends.
A combination of the Tiktok videos and the various celebrities saying six seven in interviews and such meant that it ended up in the UK. Bigger kids taught it to younger kids, and now, my sweet little boy is getting in trouble at school for saying a phrase he doesn’t even understand (because it literally means nothing) during maths.
Oh God, can you imagine being a maths teacher at the moment? Ugh…
Anyway, now Taylen has created some 6 7 branded water (this really is mental, isn’t it?), and Dictionary.com has named six seven the word of the year.
Stop the world, I want to get off.