Wednesday Morning Rant

At work last week, I found myself at an awkward intersection of meme and idiom. I used an idiom - not a hugely popular one, but not a particularly unusual one, either (or so I thought) - and got a very weird reaction from my colleagues. It turns out that the idiom is somewhat close to a particular TikTok meme. My colleagues' reaction was basically, "why the heck are you not only referencing that meme, why are you using it so strangely?" I then got to explain that it was quite a lot older than 2025.

The meme in question is referred to, as near as I can tell, the "6-7 meme." It originated on TikTok and has, if Wikipedia is to believed, no meaning in particular. As they put it in the article:

6-7 (pronounced "six seven"; also spelt 67 or 6 7) is an Internet meme and slang term that emerged in 2025 on TikTok and Instagram Reels and later spread to YouTube Shorts. It has no fixed meaning.

The meme, described as "annoying" and "like a plague" has been linked by multiple news outlets to the wider "brain rot" phenomenon - digital media deemed to be of poor quality. Some commentators also see it as evidence of Generation Alpha's growing presence in Internet culture.

The idiom is quite old. Some attribute it to Chaucer, coming from the odds associated the dice game called Hazard. Shakespeare used a form of it in Richard II. A competing theory is that it comes from disputes among power players in the City of London. Whatever the source, it's been around for a long while. Despite its age, I found that I was only one in the office who knew the idiom and I ended up doing nothing but sowing confusion. I meant to describe disorder, and they heard a junk phrase with no semantic meaning. We just ended up confusing each other.

Idiom is always somewhat perilous because it is only useful if both parties know what it means, but this one may be particularly perilous due to both the apparent rarity of the idiom and the overwhelming commonality of the vaguely similar meme. But this little moment of unexpected lack of clarity did make me wonder. Is there something special about those two numbers? Why both an ancient idiom and a contemporary nonsense phrase?

I don't know if there is something inherently interesting about the occurrence of "6" and "7" that makes it appealing, but it sure did show up in a big way last year, just as the once-common idiom had essentially died out. It also put me in the weird position of saying one thing and being misunderstood as meaning another due to relative popularity.

If not for the meme, the idiom would likely have been clear to another native English speaker just through context - but in the presence of the meme, it did nothing but cause general confusion. My use the idiom, ironically, put the conversation "at sixes and sevens."

How embarrassing.

posted by Joe Mannix at 11:00 AM

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