THERE ARE FEW certainties in life, but one you can count on is that that kids will always use slang and at some point, parents will be confused by it.

You don’t think it’s ever going to happen to you, however. You think you’ll always be in on the latest slang and double meanings or in jokes of the current generation, until one day you find yourself on the outside of the realm of slang context and boom: you instantly feel old.

Up until recently, I’ve been pretty au fait with my children’s slang words. Phrases like ‘rizz,’ ‘so sigma’ and ‘skibidi’ have been dropped into the conversation for the last year or so, with the word ‘bruh’ tagged on the end for good measure. So far, I’ve been keeping up well enough because I can see how these phrases would be used in a sentence or what the context is.

But like that unavoidable circle of life scenario, my kid’s latest obsession, ‘6-7’, which every parent of young children in the world will most likely be familiar with, is the one that’s finally made me feel like I’m past it – and I’m not alone. It seems ‘6-7’ has been causing grownups to scratch their heads in confusion, because no one seems to know what in the hell it actually means.

So what does it mean?

Everyone I ask is sketchy on the details to be honest, so the other day, I reluctantly caved and googled it to find out what it actually means. I didn’t get a proper answer by the way, because it means absolutely feck all, other than I am now officially old and googling my kids’ slang words.

After a bit of digging, the best I could come up with is that the phrase comes from rapper Skrilla’s song “Doot Doot (6 7)”, which references the height of a basketball player who, funnily enough, is 6ft 7in. That’s it. It has no direct correlation to how it’s being used by the kids. But being used it is, and rarely has a kids’ slang phrase caused such reaction from the grownups in the room.

A flurry of people have been scratching their heads trying to find the deeper meaning within it, when on the surface, it means nothing at all.

I’ve seen headlines asking if parents should be worried and is it some kind of secret code to fool unsuspecting parents like ‘Netflix and Chill?’, or the various double meaning of seemingly innocuous emojis which hint at completely different conversations happening in plain sight.

All this, over two numbers? I must be getting old, because I just don’t get the hype.

Banned

The funniest part about it all is that most kids don’t really know what it means either. It’s literally just a funny phrase they like to trot out when anyone has the misfortune of mentioning either number in any content. It’s a punchline, a way to get a giggle and drive the grownups mad in the process, a bit like ‘Chicken Jockey’ from the Minecraft movie.

The ones I feel sorry for in all of this are the teachers because I suspect that if they hear the phrase ‘6-7’ one more time, they’re going to lose their sanity. Right now, classrooms are full of children sitting there like Cheshire cats smiling, just waiting with bated breath for the moment their teacher casually says something like, “Okay class, turn to page 67,” so they can all respond with a resounding and immediate chorus of “Six-sevvuuuuhnn!”.

Ba dum tsss! Cue hysterical laughter from the children and presumably lots of eye rolling and stress-induced eye twitching from the teachers. In desperation, some have even banned it from the classroom, a counterproductive move I can only presume will make ‘6-7’ even more desirable for the kids.

In an effort for clarity, I went to the source and asked my eight-year-old what it was all about, and while he muttered something about the height of a basketball player, for him, the thing that made it really cool, apart from when the whole class chants it, was that “parents don’t know what it means.” And doesn’t that just say it all?

The old lingo

It took me back to my own days of the 90s when we’d say things like ‘psych’, ‘dope’, ‘deadly’, ‘fly’, ‘talk to the hand’, ‘hello?’ or ‘whassup?’ It was all about how you said it, and the fact that your parents didn’t say it or know how to use it in the correct context that made it worthy.

So while ‘6-7’ is a head-wrecking phrase that I still don’t really get, what I do know is that, like all slang phrases, it will have its moment in the sun and soon the kids will move on to the next phrase to baffle the ‘olds’ with, (or ‘unc’, I believe is what we’re being called now.)

I think what adults really hate about phrases like this is that it makes us feel old, because these words don’t have the same cultural meaning to us as they do to the kids.

In the end, you’ve just got to accept it’s the circle of life, but if it’s really driving you crazy, the answer to getting them to stop saying it is staring you in the face.

Simply start using it yourself. Casually drop it into conversation with as much gusto as you can muster and as if you’ve been saying it all your life, because nothing sucks the street cred out of a slang phrase faster than when the grownups start using it.