Parents everywhere are likely frightened to count to 10 in their own homes, lest they tempt their children by getting to the numbers six and seven.
If that means nothing to you, then you’ve successfully avoided the 6-7 meme. Congrats to you and your blissfully offline life. That sounds healthy.
But for the logged-on masses, kids saying six-seven to everything has simply become a fact of life. And yes, that is pretty much it: people are just saying six-seven in a particular cadence…and that is the meme. It’s everywhere right now — and it has a somewhat peculiar origin story.
How the 6-7 meme started
In short, the meme comes from a rap track called “Doot Doot” by Skrilla, during which he sings “6-7” in the familiar cadence. Know Your Meme notes this is likely a reference to a street in Philadelphia.
But the meme isn’t really in reference to the song. Not really, anyway. TikTok virality relies heavily on sounds, and people used the song to make edits of basketball players — most notably, 6-foot-7 tall LaMelo Ball — which took off.
Mashable Trend Report
From there, as memes typically do, the whole meaning and use of 6-7 evolved. The most important iteration involved a kid at a basketball game effectively using the lyric, paired with an up-and-down hand motion, as an emote, which is when an avatar in a video game does a movement typically just for fun or celebration.
That up-and-down movement became the default way kids meme six-seven in real life.
So…what is the 6-7 meme?
In short, it’s nonsense. It’s silly. It’s filler and fun to say. The meme isn’t really about the song, or about basketball, or height, or even really the numbers six and seven. It’s taking any excuse to be silly. So if someone says six, seven, six-seven, or 67, then you have the opportunity to do the meme. Or you can just do the meme because it’s funny to say.
We’ve written at Mashable in the past that TikTok has a unique ability to shape language. Among kids, that’s especially true. Young people have always relied on creating their own shared language, but the TikTok generation is able to do it overnight. You can go from a rap song to a basketball player to a kid at a game to an entirely new, extremely viral phrase in no time at all.
So if you hear a kid saying six-seven all the time, it’s likely something they’re saying because, well, everyone is saying it. At this point, it is totally divorced from its origins and just a thing to do.
And if it’s proven annoying to the parents out there, don’t worry. These trends don’t last. I see it going on for six, seven more months at most.
