A Tailored Adult’s Guide to Kids’ Culture: Why “6-7” Is the Word of the Year
Much to the chagrin of such mundane numbers as 35 and 192, the number 6-7 has become ingrained in American culture. I suspect the young people’s love of 6-7 is because 67 is the nineteenth prime number and the atomic weight of holmium, which is essential for samarium-cobalt magnets, but I can’t say for sure.
I can tell you that the number 6-7 is everywhere—on TikTok, in memes, and now in the dictionary. And that’s just one of the many confusing trends I’ll be covering this week. I’ll also tell you about Soulja Boy selling smart glasses, the belt-mounted sunglasses trend, and “Beez in the Trap.”
Dictionary.com named the word of the year “6-7”
The Alpha slang word 6-7 has been named the 2025 Word of the Year by Dictionary.com. “We’re still trying to figure out what it means exactly,” Dictionary.com says, adding, “Perhaps the most important feature of 6-7 is that it’s impossible to define. It’s meaningless, ubiquitous, and meaningless.”
The dictionary’s website points out that 6-7 tends to annoy adults, while among the kids who use it, it confers “insider” status; hitting “six- seven ” at the right moment marks you out as a certain type of person in the eyes of other Gen Aers. The real question about 6-7 is how long it can last: now that everyone, including the dictionary and HBO , is using your secret word, can it continue to be cool?
Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year nominees include “aura farming,” a word that refers to someone doing something overtly cool; “clanker,” a slur aimed at robots and AI agents pretending to be human; and “tradwife,” a woman who believes in and adheres to traditional gender roles in marriage.
(If you’re looking for definitions for a whole bunch of modern slang expressions that haven’t made it onto dictionary.com yet, check out Lifehacker’s Dictionary of Gen Z and Alpha Slang, which you might need to decipher . )
Sam Altman just renamed ChatGPT 6 to ChatGPT 6-7
In a post on X on Friday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that GPT-6 would be renamed GPT-6-7. See?
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Altman didn’t offer any further details, and it’s probably just a joke in response to dictionary.com’s word of the year selection. But it really makes me think 6-7 is already behind us. How can so many completely uncool people keep using your buzzword until you have to invent a new one?
Soulja Boy is selling smart glasses with artificial intelligence.
Rapper Soulja Boy is 35 years old, making him more of a Soulja Middle-Aged-Man, but Soulja Boy’s spirit is eternally youthful, especially when he’s dabbling in endeavors like selling his own brand of “AI-powered smart glasses.” In a recent Instagram post, Souljah urged everyone to “step into the future” and “see the world in style” with smart glasses that promise a “fusion of innovation and technology.”
While others are paying $800 for the latest Meta glasses , Soulja Boy’s smart glasses can be yours for just $64.50. For that price, you won’t get a display or wrist-mounted remote. Instead, Soulja Boy’s glasses offer “hands-free music control, enhanced live performances, and seamless social media connectivity.” I’m not sure what that means. Other great Soulja Boy products to buy: a portable gaming console for $42 and Soulja Boy headphones for $20 .
Character.ai is shutting down its teen chats.
In a move that seems very much like a response to recent lawsuits , leading AI-powered chatbot platform Character.ai announced it will no longer allow anyone under 18 to have open conversations with its chatbots . The platform boasts over 20 million users; officially, about 53% of them are between 18 and 24 years old, and only 10% are under 18. But these are all self-reported ages without verification, so it’s impossible to know how many users are secretly children. My guess is it’s much higher than 10%—the platform’s gimmick is allowing people to interact with user-created “characters” powered by AI models, and a quick look at the site reveals that cartoon characters , memes , and rappers you’ve never heard of are very popular “characters” on the site. Beyond that, it’s hard to see how something like this could hold the interest of anyone over a certain age.
In any case, if you want to know the kind of troubling conversations kids are having with chatbots, this report, published in September by online safety advocates Parents Together Action, describes interactions like Rey from Star Wars giving a 13-year-old girl advice on how to hide from her parents that she’s not taking her prescribed antidepressants, and a Patrick Mahomes bot offering a 15-year-old a cannabis edible.
This Week’s Disturbing TikTok Trend: Waist-Hugging Sunglasses
TikTok seems to be playing a never-ending game of whack-a-mole with unhealthy eating content. Seemingly innocuous hashtags like ” what I eat in a day ” are filled with videos of people who are clearly undernourished, and TikTok banned the hashtag #skinnytok entirely a few months ago. The latest trend is the “waist sunglasses challenge,” which involves testing whether your sunglasses will fit around your waist. (Mine don’t, but only because I don’t have a giant head.) There’s nothing specifically harmful about it, perhaps, but the implied message is congratulations if you can pull it off, since it means you’re incredibly skinny. It’s a kind of ban-evasion technique that highlights the difficulty of trying to ban ideas, even harmful ones. They tend to slip through. (Although, to be fair, a number of TikTok accounts with the caption “Waist Sunglasses” that appear on Google appear to have been removed, though it’s unclear whether the social media app itself banned them or whether the account owners removed them.)
Viral Video Trend of the Week: Beez in the Trap
Nicki Minaj’s 2012 song “Beez in the Trap” and 4 Non-Blonde’s 1993 hit “What’s Going on?” are both established hits in their own right, but who could have predicted that they would pair so well together that they would inspire tens of thousands of TikTok memes?
But let me start by explaining the phrase “Beez in the trap.” In this context, “beez” means “I always,” and “trap” used to refer to a place where drugs were sold, but now it’s used to refer to any place where money is made, like an office. So, “I beez in the trap” means something like, “I’m always hustling to make money.”
Let’s move on to memes: they work like this: two people stand back to back. The first passionately sings along to the chorus of “4 Non Blonde,” and the camera switches to the second, who echoes Minaj’s less existentially angsty contribution to the mashup. It’s one of those moments that works in a completely inexplicable way. Watch:
One way or another, the trend caught on, and celebrities, such as the Kardashians, began to copy it:
And Jimmy Fallon:
I guess it’s no surprise that “look at me !” professionals have embraced this attention-grabbing trend, but I much prefer videos of regular people.