Kirby Neumann-Rea: '6 7' becomes digital era touchpoint
News item: “In-N-Out Burger has eliminated use of ‘67’ for orders in its restaurants, due to a viral meme causing disruptive outbursts when the number is called.”
The list grows.
We are surrounded by phrases and names that are either repetitive, contradictory, applied in cases where something else already works just fine or applied in new and unwelcome ways.
- Sanction (yes, go ahead) and sanction (no, stop).
- Oversight (ah, watching you) and oversight (oops, missed that).
- Hashtag, pound sign, number. Three names for the same crossing-pairs-of-parallel-lines symbol. Just when did “hashtag” arrive on the scene anyway?
Heck, there’s even Adam Ant, forgotten ‘80s rocker and Atom Ant, obscure ‘60s cartoon character.
English is a weird language in its many ways of folding over on itself.
Enter “6 7,” announced this fall as Dictionary.com’s strange choice for Word of the Year. You might also see it rendered 6-7 or six seven.
The viral meme both echoes and supplants “sixes and sevens,” as the meaning of the phrase dating to Shakespeare is similar in its open-endedness: to be unsure of what to do or how to respond.
In Richard II, Shakespeare wrote: “But time will not permit: all is uneven. And everything is left at six and seven.”
In 1919, it took on a certain prescience — well, it was uttered by H.G. Wells — in his comment on the League of Nations: “All the people who were interested in these league of nations projects were at sixes and sevens among themselves because they had the most vague, heterogeneous and untidy assumptions about what the world of men was, what it had been, and therefore of what it could be.”
The meme “6 7” is normally accompanied by a slow up-down of raised palms, a gesture suggesting: not sure, could go either way, at sixes and sevens.
Late night TV genius Stephen Colbert pushed back this way: “No, word of the year has to be a word, not numbers.”
In “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” T.E. Lawrence spelled the city name “Jiddah” 11 different ways because he did not know the proper way to render it from the Arabic. So it is with the new Word of the Year: There seems to be no definitive translation.
Exasperated discussing it in the opening of his Oct. 30 show, Colbert explained, “6-7 is a viral trend where if anyone says the number six or the number seven, or if there’s any reason to talk about numbers at all, every young person within earshot goes ‘6-7’.”
Hence the In-N-Out burger chain’s overreaction.
In late October, I renewed my commitment to the Start Making A Reader Today program, volunteering at Newby Elementary. In my first week with first-grader Jax, who has a brother in grade 6, the youngster impishly and repetitively said “6 7” with a grin — triumphantly pointing out pages 6 and 7 in a book we read, and generally finding any excuse to say it during our 25 minutes together.
I tried, futilely, to deflect.
The next week, Jax was back at “6 7,” though less so, and the following week, it did not come up at all. I was almost disappointed.
“Six or seven” or “6-7” or however you say it, has really has no concrete meaning. Oddly, if it were a code, like 4/20 or 86, it would make more sense. Instead, it’s the 23-Skidoo of these Roving ’20s.
The simultaneity this fall of Dictionary.com honoring 6 7 and South Korea giving Donald Trump a golden crown are two disparate cases of “thanks for doing us a favor — not.”
“It’s like a plague, a virus that has taken over kids’ minds,” CNN reports a middle school teacher saying.
I believe, as vaunted words go, ones truly deserving Word of the Year honors, it will fall into history’s list of overrated culture points, ranking up there with “Forrest Gump,” the Oscar winner for best picture, along with “The New Coke” and “Care to Macarena?”
CNN also points out that while 6-7 actually means nothing, “using it can make a student feel like a member of a bigger, cooler group of peers.”
Fair enough. Until it runs its course, as “rad” and “ill” did, and its users will become social outcasts.
For now, though, “six seven” (no one knows quite how to put it in text) is perhaps the perfect choice for our TikTok-happy, celebrity-obsessed culture: It is merely famous for being famous.
Pronounced “six-seven” in the TikTok-verse, it’s an all-purpose, tastes-like-chicken, margarine-on-the-sandwich-of-language kind of phrase. Maybe it’s a good sign that the honor comes from Dictionary.com, so more middle schoolers will see some new appeal in a dictionary.
But I say, “Thank you, D.com.” While I have no idea what the meme-orable term means, part of me wants to embrace it.
Let all of us 67-year-olds just bask in the glory.
While In-N-Out has banned the number, other fast food outlets are owning it, offering 67-cent fries and other in-the-moment promotions.
Sure, it’s not really “67” or “sixty-seven.” I get that. But it comes in my 67th year, and I like celebrating the alignment of the two digits.
Besides, Jax was amazed, and not a little amused, when I told him, “I’m 67.”
Since no one really knows what 6 7 means anyway, why not make it a reference to the wonderful year 1958, along with all of us born in it and all the things that happened in it?
NASA was created. So so was the European Economic Community, and it was the year the Soviets launched Sputnik.
Credit cards became a thing that year. Talk about phenomena still with us.
Eisenhower was in the White House. Think of how normal that felt.
And an event resounds from Oct. 31, 1958: The USSR, USA and the UK declared a moratorium on nuclear weapons testing.
So as I look at it, 67— however you say or write it — is the phrase of the hour and the year. Hey, better than a mere 15 minutes!
A version of this column originally appeared in Kirby Neumann-Rea’s Burn the Ax Handle newsletter on Substack.com. The “Quirk of the Week” columnist for News-Register retired as managing editor in April. A Linfield Class of ’80 alum, Neumann-Rea proudly wears his “Streak Street 67 Years” T-shirt.
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