Featured Image Credit: Getty images/Nikada
Topics: History
William Morgan
The meaning behind the viral '6-7' meme has continued to baffle older generations as the phrase spreads like wildfire through schools across the country.
Early attempts to explain the meme have attempted to explain that the phrase has no meaning, instead chalking it up as a reference to Philadelphia drill rapper Skrilla's track 'Doot Doot'.
Others have claimed the meaningless phrase, often associated with moving both hands up and down, was popularised by a TikTok user, who used the Skrilla song to joke that 6'7" NBA player LaMelo Ball actually plays like he's 6'2".
However, these Gen Alpha meme-lords could in fact be interacting with an idea that dates back to the late medieval era, first recorded in English by ancient wordsmiths, who also attached great meaning to the numbers six and seven.
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Probably the oldest reference to this pair of consecutive numbers is contained in the writings of 14th century poet Geoffrey Chaucer, whose often raunchy verse is regarded by many academics as the start of the English literary canon of great works.
In his epic poem retelling the events of two tragic lovers in ancient Greece, Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer unwittingly wrote something that, in a rare occurence, would set a modern classroom alight.
Criseyde's supportive uncle, acting as a go-between for the forbidden lovers, implores heroic Troilus to take action and 'manly set the world on sixe and sevene.'
When translated from Middle English, this line reveals what '6-7' meant to people for centuries before Skrilla repopularized the term.
Here, Troilus is being asked to 'risk all on a six or seven,' in reference to a popular dice game called 'Hazard', where scoring a six or seven is the least likely outcome and something players try to avoid.
Poet and playwright William Shakespeare, often regarded as one of the world's greatest writers, also made at least one direct reference that would set off a classroom full of Gen Z and Alpha students.
Like with Chaucer, he too makes direct reference to the game Hazard, a slightly more complicated version of Craps, while also coining a phrase in 1695 that still exists today.
In Richard II, he uses the numbers to describe a situation where everything has fallen to disorder and misfortune. 'All is uneven, and everything is left at six and seven,' the great bard wrote.
Also drawing this connection between the meme and a medieval dice game, David Marcus explained in an opinion piece for Fox how the game of Hazard, popular in pubs and inns across Britain for centuries, actually worked and why '6-7' was considered unfortunate.
He said: "In the game, a player would call out the number he was trying to shoot for, or make, with two six-sided dice. Five, eight and nine were the most likely results. Six and seven, gamblers quickly discovered either through math or experience, offered lower odds and hence less chance of winning."
Famous for her character-driven Regency romances like Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's writings also surprisingly show the longevity of this old meaning for the modern '6-7' meme.
In an unfinished novel written before she achieved fame titled Catherine, or The Bower, the massively successful female writer shows how the dice game reference has developed as a metaphor over the centuries since Chaucer.
Rather than being deployed simply as a reference to two unlucky numbers that a gambler would have to be confused to shoot for, Austen uses the metaphor to explain her female protagonist's disordered interior life.
'Everything as she expressed herself be at sixes and sevens,' Austen wrote in 1792.
Scholars have claimed that this line as a rejection of the strict view of femininity at the time, showing women's interior lives as being just as complex and contradictory as a man's.
So, the next time a school student starts referencing the confusing '6-7' meme, you can take all the fun out of the joke by explaining how Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Austen, were all in on the meme.