Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI
If you’re roaming the hallways or lunchrooms of American schools, you might think that kids are suddenly really into math. You’ll hear everyone from elementary age kids to high schoolers yell “six seven!” or “41!!!” to their friends with glee.
I’m here to report to my fellow adults that brainrot has gotten so rotted that Gen Alpha — kids under 14, or so — are just saying numbers as memes.
To find out a little more about the how, the why, and the WTH of all this, I talked to Henry De Tolla, who I’d say is one of the foremost experts on teenagers babbling nonsensical memespeak. In fact, he’s a driving force of the art himself. You may recognize De Tolla as the face and droll voice of the viral video where he narrates the news that “Baby Gronk just rizzed up Livvy Dunne again … is Baby Gronk the new rizz king?“
Are You On Team 41 or Team 67? #67kid #team67 #team41 #h00pify #blizziboi
De Tolla, 22, is a recent college grad from UMass Lowell and has built a large following on his H00pify TikTok and Instagram channels. His videos are mostly memey jokes about sports, but he’s found a specific niche with content about the youth sports world. That’s a great niche to be part of — youth sports are a $40 billion industry in the US with millions of young participants. De Tolla has essentially found his role as a demented Howard Cosell of youth sports.
The “six-seven” and “41” memes both originated in songs, De Tolla surmises. Six-seven started less than a year ago, when someone mashed up a clip of NBA player LaMelo Ball saying he was 6 feet 7 inches tall with a song by Skrilla that had the line “six seven” in it.
An important note, for the uninitiated: The six-seven meme is pronounced “six, seven,” not “sixty-seven.” But! In a twist, the “41” meme is pronounced “forty-one.”
From there, the meme appears to have snowballed.
“Then there was this guy who plays for Overtime Elite, and that’s where that kid was screaming ‘six seven,’ but I’ll get to that in one second. Sorry, sorry if this is not making sense,” De Tolla said.
But that’s basically the point: It’s not supposed to make sense. There’s some faint origin story about the meme, but probably most teenagers calling it out in class aren’t aware of it. It’s just silly and stupid to laugh at a number. (I exclude 69 and 420 from this whole conversation, since those have decadeslong specific meanings and are basically boomer memes.)
“My mom asked me about this, too, because she was like, ‘Is 67 dirty?'” De Tello said. “I’m like, ‘No, literally, it doesn’t really have a meaning to it, and I think it is just funny.'”
Does The 68 Kid Have More Aura Than The 67 Kid? #forgotten67kid #68kid #67kid #mazenhoward #h00pify
“In one sense, you could say the memes are so complex, or the brainrot is so deep now that people don’t understand it,” De Tello said. “But also, it couldn’t be more simple: That’s literally just what they are. There’s no meaning.”
Randomness has always been funny for young people, but this has some self-awareness. “Randomness” can also be kind of dorky, but this meme is in the domain of the jocks rather than the nerds — its sports-world origins make it cool, which gives it staying power.
It’s not purely an internet meme, either. Super-visual internet memes, like “Distracted boyfriend” or Spider-Man pointing at himself, are for online-only. But six-seven and 41 are for real life — you laugh when the teacher says the numbers in class, or call them out in the hallways.
I have a theory on why this might be happening
On one hand, we shouldn’t be surprised that Gen Alpha is developing memes and slang on its own; so did Gen Z and millennials before them, and so has every youth generation since the 1950s. Is “six-seven” significantly different from “cheugy,” or “on fleek,” or “all your base are belong to us?” Not totally, I don’t think.
But here’s where I do think it is different. It IS purposely stupidier and meaningless than ever. Usually, memes are fun because you understand the deeper meaning behind them; “six-seven” is fun precisely because it has no deeper meaning. (I asked my third grader if he had ever heard of the “six-seven” meme, and he said it’s frequently yelled at recess, but had zero clue about its origins. He just knew it was funny and that was enough for him.)
And here’s where I have a theory: Number memes like “six-seven,” which barely have meaning and are simply a number, could be a small rebellion against AI. Consider this: High school seniors have never had a school year without ChatGPT. To them, the creation of words and language is cheap and easy. What better way to confound AI — or reject how it spits out words — than to make a meme that is simply numbers?
A new paper by researchers shows that people might be starting to speak in ways influenced by AI, using word choices and phrasing (“delve” and “underscores”) that are more common in ChatGPT outputs than in normal human speech. But AI never randomly yells out numbers as a joke.
Admittedly, this theory is a stretch.
I pitched my theory to De Tello. “I’ve had the same thoughts about that,” he said. “I don’t know how much AI will ever be able to dive into internet culture. I just don’t know how it could ever comprehend the trend ‘6-7’ and the 41 thing without being completely perplexed.”
Or maybe, kids just like yelling stupid stuff.
The post Gen Alpha’s latest slang makes zero sense — and that’s the point appeared first on Business Insider.
