The expression “6-7” spread like wildfire last year, making its way outside the realm of usual adolescent slang and into the collective discourse, popping up at public sports events, in Halloween costumes and even in teachers’ lesson plans.
A couple of things are clear about the 6-7 phenomenon: kids love saying it and adults love hating it. But what does it actually mean? The answer — “It doesn’t mean anything” — appears to be the main complaint. But meaning nothing is kind of the whole point.
While it may not signify anything in the conventional sense of meaning, 6-7 expresses solidarity and belonging.
Users of the expression show that they’re part of the in-group as opposed to those who “just don’t get it.” They’re deploying something sociolinguists call “social meaning.”
Social meaning can be thought of as value-added information about the speaker and their attitude, their stance and how they want to portray themselves in the world. It’s an integral part to how we understand language, and the fact that this is being spread by young adolescents is no accident.
Learning a language is hard, but even native speakers get confused by pronunciation, connotations, definitions and etymology. The lexicon is constantly evolving, especially in the social media era, where new memes, catchphrases, slang, jargon and idioms are introduced at a rapid clip. Slanguage, The Conversation Canada’s new series, dives into how language shapes the way we see the world and what it reveals about culture, power and belonging. Welcome to the wild and wonderful world of linguistics.
Not all meaning is about dictionary definitions
When people think about meaning, it’s normally semantic meaning. Six, for example, is a numerical concept that we understand to mean one more than five and one less than seven. It’s another way of saying half a dozen. It’s the age that most children enter Grade 1. Maybe it’s suppertime.
6-7, on the other hand, is void of any semantic meaning. It doesn’t even refer to quantity. Consider the difference between, “I’d like 6-7 crackers” versus simply yelling “6-7” and doing the viral hand gesture. The 6-7 in the first sentence means an amount of crackers, the 6-7 in the latter does not actually refer to an amount at all. But that doesn’t make it meaningless.
While 6-7 has no semantic meaning, it has a very definite social meaning. Social meaning involves how hearers interpret language not only on the basis of the meaning of the words, but on the basis of what kind of person is speaking and how they align themselves socially.
And the truth is that we rely on social meaning like this all the time, even if we don’t notice it.
Social meaning speaks volumes
Consider a person’s clothing and hairstyle, for example.
Wearing a Winnipeg Jets jersey and a mullet hairstyle signals to people in Canada things about you without you even opening your mouth: you’re a hockey enthusiast, invested in a team, and probably play or watch the game regularly. Then, to add to these visual cues, you can use a phrase such as “Fire that biscuit top shelf!” that lets people know not only that you want your player to “shoot the puck up high in the corner of the net,” (semantic meaning) but also that you’re positioning yourself as a hockey person who is knowledgeable on the matter (social meaning).
True synonyms are rare in languages. Even when there are two words that mean the same thing, they usually have different connotations, are used in different contexts or have different social meanings. Calling a “puck” a “biscuit” might be referring to the same object, but it certainly does not have the same overall meaning in discourse.
Usually, words have at least semantic meaning and sometimes also social meaning. 6-7 is interesting precisely because it has no semantic meaning, only social meaning, which is much more uncommon.
Slang, social development and growing up
The fact that an expression with only social meaning has been adopted primarily by adolescents is to be expected. Adolescence is a period of intense social development.
This age group is leaving childhood behind, and the teenage years have consistently been found to be a time of deep linguistic change when social meaning becomes paramount as they strive to stake their own place in the world. Adolescents are demarcating themselves both from younger children and from their parents.
This era results in what is often called the adolescent peak of 15 to 17, when the use of new slang and innovative items is most pronounced. That said, 6-7 is generally used by a younger group, more in the 11 to 14 age range — and even younger now, as it moves rapidly through the population.
It’s possible that we’re seeing the effects of children being online at a younger age, and that this intense social development is happening earlier.
In the end, the fact that 6-7 doesn’t mean anything is perfectly fine. It’s not simply “brain rot,” but rather the developmentally appropriate creation of a saying with social meaning for adolescents at a time when social dynamics are the most important aspect of their lives.
And if you really hate it, don’t worry, you don’t have to use it, and yes, it will pass. By now it’s so widespread that only the uncool (adults and younger kids) are using it anyway. It has already lost its cachet.
A new perplexing, yet socially meaningful, phrase or expression will soon take its place. In fact, it appears that 41 may be the new 6-7.
Nicole Rosen has received funding from The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canada Research Chair program.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
