Joshua Rothman on the popularity of the internet slang “six seven” among kids in Generation Alpha, and what it does and doesn’t mean.
“What is ‘six seven,’ anyway?” I asked him, not long ago. “It’s brain rot,” he said, confidently. I followed up: “What’s brain rot?” “It’s random stuff from the internet that fills up your brain,” he said.
If you’re attentive to language, you might notice that the meaning of “brain rot” has shifted since 2024, when Oxford University Press named it Word of the Year. Back then, it was described as a state of mental deterioration brought on by immersion in “trivial or unchallenging” online information. Now brain rot is a content category: in the wildly popular video game Steal a Brainrot, for example, players buy or capture “Brainrots,” which are surreal A.I.-generated characters with—for some reason—Italianesque names. When Peter and his friends aren’t saying “six seven” sotto voce, so as to avoid teacherly detection, they’re talking about “Chimpanzini Bananini!” or “Ballerina Cappuccina!” The case for seeing “six seven” as brain rot is strong. In a masterly account of the phrase’s origins in the Wall Street Journal, Ellen Gamerman explains how Skrilla’s “Doot Doot ” was used to soundtrack video edits of LaMelo Ball, an N.B.A. point guard who is six feet seven; these, Gamerman writes, inspired a video, filmed courtside at a school basketball game, in which “a boy with forward-swept hair . . . lurches toward the camera and delivers a giddy ‘six seven,’ ” complete with hand gestures. This clip was shared and remixed, and the saying spread until it became a mysterious part of pop culture. “Six seven,” in short, seems to be an internet-based phenomenon, dependent upon the social media in which we’re all enmeshed; perhaps this means it’s just another ripple in the sea of monetized inanity. On November 6th and 7th, from six to 7 P.M., McDonald’s restaurants in the United Arab Emirates gave away orders of “six seven” McNuggets . “Meaningless, ubiquitous, and nonsensical,” the lexicographers of Dictionary.com argue, “six seven” is “the logical endpoint of being perpetually online, scrolling endlessly, consuming content fed to users by algorithms trained by other algorithms.” They’ve named it their Word of the Year for 2025. The senselessness of “six seven” contributes to the impression of brain rot. “It’s absurd and random,” the actress Elizabeth Olsen said recently, on “Late Night with Seth Meyers.” This is certainly true—and yet linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists have long known that much of what we say is meaningless. In 1923, in a seminal essay titled “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages,” the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski observed that, whenever people get together, they talk about a whole lot of nothing. “As much among savage tribes as in a European drawing-room,” he wrote, social life involves a lot of conversation in which meaning “is almost completely irrelevant”: “Inquiries about health, comments on weather, affirmations of some supremely obvious state of things—all such are exchanged, not in order to inform,” and “certainly not in order to express any thought,” but just to create “ties of union.” “Thank God it’s Friday.” “It’s hot outside.” “How’s it goin’?” “Can you believe this rain?” Malinowski described such utterances as forms of “phatic” communication. This somewhat awkward term, which has been adopted by generations of researchers, comes from the Greek verb meaning “to speak out loud.” Phatic communication is like the verbal equivalent of primate grooming behavior: it’s a way for people to provide and experience connection and companionship. We’re so used to thinking in terms of written language, which almost always means something, that the idea of meaningless language might seem like an oxymoron. But when we’re dealing with what Malinowski calls “wingéd words, passing from man to man,” it’s often the case that “the conception of meaning as contained in an utterance is false and futile.” If you respond to the deli guy’s “How ya doin’?” with an earnest account of your mood that day, you’re making the mistake of attributing meaning to a meaningless bit of phatic communication. It’s like thinking that, because the barista smiles at you, she’s interested. Could meaninglessness itself be a message? In a recent exploration of “six seven” in the Times, the style reporter Callie Holtermann argues that the phrase might be seen as “a kind of gleeful obfuscation, an effort to be unknowable by a generation that has, virtually since birth, been relentlessly on display.” A writer tells Holtermann that “six seven” is meant “to frustrate the olds”—it’s a way of saying, “Let us exist in our own space.” These ideas sound plausible, but might be too centered on the concerns of adults. When a busload of elementary schoolers shouts “six seven!” between the sixth and seventh stops, are they really trying to say something to the bus driver? “There is in all human beings the well-known tendency to congregate, to be together, to enjoy each other’s company,” Malinowski writes. Childhood and adolescence are socially challenging. Maybe kids love “six seven” because it makes togetherness easy. What does “six seven” look like, from this perspective? In “Interaction Ritual Chains” , Collins lays out a holistic theory of human nature, centered on rituals, into which “six seven” fits nicely. A ritual, Collins explains, “is a mechanism of mutually focussed emotion and attention producing a momentarily shared reality.” There are big-time rituals, like communion, and small-time ones, like shaking hands, or dapping up, or standing at the front of a conference room and clearing your throat. These acts—which often involve a physical component—help make gatherings of people cohere. Rituals are “everywhere,” Collins writes, because social life is ultimately “a string of situations” which must be inaugurated, conducted, and concluded. Rituals do more than lend structure to our days, Collins argues; they also create “emotional energy,” which is something we crave. We want to feel alive, valued, connected, “charged up.” On Sundays, in church, we experience something special when we’re all together, praying; we have “feelings of confidence, enthusiasm, and desire for action.” We can’t stay in church forever, but its rituals attach their emotion to “cognitive symbols,” which we might later use to extend the good vibes. Church ends; you go home; ordinary life resumes. But, later, you see the steeple above the treetops, and you feel a surge of energy flowing from your fellows and God. “What holds society together?” Collins asks. The answer is “groups of people assembled in particular places who feel solidarity with each other”—and who then find ways of sustaining that solidarity across space and time, using symbols and rituals that help them feel it even when they’re not together. The internet has changed society a great deal, but it hasn’t changed it completely. We’re still the same old human beings, with the same old ways of relating to one another. “Six seven” wouldn’t exist without marketing, virality, and brain rot—but it’s not reducible to those things. Earlier this week, my wife and I took Peter to an after-school program at a nearby arboretum. Along with a few other kids, whom he didn’t know, he was made to tromp desultorily through the cold grounds, collecting leaves to use in some unspecified craft project. The kids shuffled and wandered, tired at the end of a long day. Then the organizer pointed out a tree that, unusually, bore forty kinds of fruit—it was a work of living botanical wizardry created, through grafting, by the artist Sam Van Aken. “Forty-one,” Peter exclaimed. The other kids laughed, and their gazes met. For a little while, their energy returned. ♦
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