6_7 nr another gen_z (or perhaps even gen_alpha) thing i don't get, but it's fun to google. 260319 ... ovenbird It’s one of those things that makes you feel extremely old as a parent because it makes no sense at all and you begin to think that you’re losing your grip on the times, becoming irrelevant. But then, the trends of the day have never made sense to me, and I’ve always felt like an outsider, so I’m not sure this is much different. Six-Seven came out of nowhere and it went back to that nowhere almost as fast as it arose. Not even my kids could really explain it to me, but it was everywhere. Its meaning hinged more on its shared use than anything concrete. It was intentionally vague, carrying a sense of “maybe” or “so-so.” It was non-committal, which meant it could be warped to mean almost anything. And it was everywhere. My mom turned 67 shortly after it went viral and my kids thought that was strangely auspicious. On my walks I began to see 6-7 spray painted on the outside of buildings. It’s ubiquity prompted me to learn something about the way nonsense additions to the language function in youth culture. It facilitates bonding, like a made up language, except lazier, and it allows children to feel that they have something in common with their peers that separates them from adults and plays into ideas of generational identity. It’s similar to visual memes like Italian Brainrot, which was going strong around the same time as 6-7. Both of these things lean on being fundamentally vacuous. They aren’t SUPPOSED to make sense, which is where the humour lies. Their currency is in having knowledge of the existence of these images and finding ways to refer to them. This gives the user a certain cultural cachet, through proving they’re “in the know.” So while the 6-7 trend was extremely annoying, it’s anthropologically rather interesting. And, apparently, pretending to be an anthropologist is part of how I survive parenting. 260320 what's it to you? who go blather from