Many adults are respiring a sigh of aid because the 6-7 meme fades away as one of the crucial largest kid-led international fads of 2025.
If you controlled to leave out it, 6-7 is a slang time period – spoken aloud as “six seven” – accompanied by way of an arm gesture that mimics somebody weighing one thing of their fingers.
It has no actual that means, but it surely spawned numerous movies throughout more than a few platforms and infiltrated colleges and houses around the globe. Shouts of “6-7” disrupted school rooms and rained down at wearing occasions. Suppose items proliferated.
For probably the most phase, adults spoke back with delicate annoyance and confusion.
However as media students who learn about kids’s tradition, we didn’t view the meme with bewilderment or exasperation. As an alternative, we concept again to our personal childhoods on 3 other continents – and all the name of the game languages we spoke.
There used to be Pig Latin. The cool “S” doodled on numerous worksheets and toilet stalls. Forming an L-shape with our thumb and index finger to insult somebody. Remixing the phrases of hand-clapping video games from earlier generations.
6-7 is best the most recent instance of those long-standing practices – and although the gesture would possibly no longer imply a lot to adults, it says so much about kids’s play, their social lives and their need for energy.
The impossible to resist attract of 6-7
You’ll be able to see this eager for energy in vintage play like spying on adults and in video games like “king of the hill.”
Children spend a lot in their days watched and regulated – and can leap on the probability to show the tables.
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A regular faculty day comes to a decent time table of adult-directed actions; children have little time or area for company.
However throughout the ones in-between occasions when kids are in a position to stealthily evade grownup surveillance – on playgrounds, on the net and even if caught at house throughout the pandemic – kids’s tradition can thrive. In those areas, they are able to make the principles. They set the phrases. And if it confuses adults, all of the higher.
As 6-7 went viral, academics complained that random outbursts by way of their scholars had been interrupting their courses. Some began fending off asking any more or less query that would possibly lead to a solution of 67. The craze migrated from colleges to sports activities arenas and eating places: In-N-Out Burger ended up banning the quantity 67 from their price tag ordering gadget.
The meaninglessness of 6-7 made it simple to create a way of inclusion and exclusion – and to harass adults, who strained to decipher hidden meanings. Within the U.S., siblings and buddies dressed because the numbers 6-7 for Halloween. And in Australia, it used to be rumored that properties with 6-7 of their deal with had been going for astronomical costs.
Remixing video games and rhymes
Since sooner than Global Conflict I, historians have documented kids’s use of secret languages like “back slang,” which occurs when phrases are phonetically spoken backwards. And nonsense phrases and words have lengthy proliferated in kids’s tradition: Contemporary examples come with “booyah,” “skibidi” and “talk to the hand.”
6-7 additionally coincides with a protracted historical past of youngsters revising, adapting and remixing video games and rhymes.
For instance, in our 3 nations – the U.S., Australia and South Korea – we’ve encountered unending diversifications of the sport of “tag.” Now and again the chasers faux to be the dementors from Harry Potter. Different occasions the chasers have pretended to be the COVID-19 virus. Or we’ll see them incorporate their quick environment, like designating playground apparatus as “home” or “safe.”
Identical video games can unfold amongst kids all over the world. In South Korea, “Mugunghwa kkochi pieotseumnida” – which more or less interprets to “The rose of Sharon has bloomed,” a connection with South Korea’s nationwide flower – is very similar to the sport “Red Light, Green Light” in English-speaking nations. Within the sport “Hwang-ma!,” South Korean kids within the early aughts shouted the phrase and playfully struck a peer upon seeing a unprecedented, gold-colored automobile, a sport very similar to “Punch Buggy” and “Slug Bug” within the U.S. and Australia.
Permutations of ‘Red Light, Green Light’ exist all over the world.
Jarek Tuszyński/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Traditionally, kids have transformed rhymes and clapping video games to attract on pop culture of the day. “Georgie Best, Superstar,” sung to the track of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” used to be a well-liked chant on U.Ok. playgrounds within the Seventies that celebrated the mythical football participant George Highest. And a variation of the clapping sport “I went to a Chinese Restaurant” incorporated the lyrics “My name is, Elvis Presley, girls are sexy, Sitting on the back seat, drinking Pepsi.”
Making area for youngsters’s tradition
One reason why 6-7 turned into so common is the low barrier to access: Pronouncing “6-7” and doing the accompanying hand motion is straightforward to pick out up and translate into other cultural contexts. The simplicity of the meme allowed younger Korean kids to copy the word in English. And deaf kids have participated by way of signing the meme.
Since the social worlds of youngsters now exist throughout a variety of on-line areas, 6-7 has been in a position to seamlessly unfold and evolve. At the gaming platform Roblox, as an example, kids can create avatars that resemble 6-7 and play video games that function the numbers.
The unusual phrases, nonsensical video games and artistic play of your youth would possibly appear ridiculous as of late. However there’s actual price in those hidden worlds.
Without or with get admission to to the web, kids will proceed to turn out to be language and video games to fit their wishes – which, sure, comprises getting underneath the surface of adults.
Quite a lot of consideration is given to the omnipresence of virtual applied sciences in kids’s lives, however we expect it’s value taking a second to comprehend the way in which kids are the usage of those applied sciences to innovate and fix in techniques each inventive and mundane.
