Why 67 broke the internet

GENERATIONAL: IT'S A MEME, A SOUND, A HAND GESTURE AND A SYMBOL OF RANDOMNESS

- Hein Kaiser

It's been a minute but the 67 meme is just not going away. In fact, Dictionary. com last week announced that it's the site's word of the year. It means nothing, but it means a lot at the same time. It's a sign that internet slang has filtered through into the mainstream.

Reports abound of kids in classrooms confusing teachers, teens and tweens greeting one another with the meme and just simply yelling it out for no reason whatsoever. Six seven, never sixty seven.

It’s a Generation Alpha term that’s leaked into Gen Z a bit and intended to confuse and laager out the not-knowers with a generational inside joke that’s, well, also a nothingness at the same time.

What started as a nonsensical lyric in a rap song has become one of the strangest linguistic trends. It’s part meme, part code and has sown confusion all over the place.

Dictionary.com said that perhaps the most defining feature of 67 is that it cannot be defined.

“It’s meaningless, ubiquitous and nonsensical. In other words, it has all the hallmarks of brain rot,” reads the site.

It further indicated that “it’s the logical endpoint of being perpetually online, scrolling endlessly, consuming content fed to users by algorithms trained by other algorithms”.