These Students Picked '6-7' Before It Was Word of the Year

Two weeks before Dictionary.com named "67" its word of the year for 2025, two International Community School of Bangkok students had already ranked it number one on their own list. On episode 104 of Students Incorporated, host Mr. Jason and student guests Pun and Proud, joined by co-hosts James and Dorcas (who goes by Midnight), spent an hour picking apart "brain rot," the internet's catch-all term for the memes, slang, and doomscrolling reshaping how their generation thinks and talks. The term the two guests chose to close their homemade top-10 countdown turned out to be the same one a national dictionary would later declare had defined the year.

When Slang Becomes Official

"67," pronounced "six-seven" and never "sixty-seven," traces back to "Doot Doot (6 7)," a 2024 drill track by the rapper Skrilla that took off in video edits of basketball highlights, particularly ones featuring LaMelo Ball, who happens to be 6-foot-7. The phrase detached from basketball entirely after a young fan named Maverick Trevillian went viral in March 2025 for shouting it at a game with an exaggerated up-and-down hand gesture, and by fall it had spread through American classrooms. Asked to define it on the show, Pun didn't try to pin down a meaning, because there isn't one. "It has no meaning," Pun said. "It's an inside joke from a game that became a nonsensical punchline."

The joke is that it's meaningless.

That circular logic is exactly why Dictionary.com picked it. The site named "67" its 2025 word of the year on October 30, describing its use as shorthand for just about anything, "so-so," "maybe this," "maybe that," delivered with a hand motion that means nothing on its own and everything in context. It wasn't the only dictionary paying attention to the same corner of the internet. Merriam-Webster's word of the year for 2025 was "slop," its term for the low-quality, mass-produced AI content flooding social feeds, a different word for a related anxiety: a digital environment evolving faster than the adults studying it can keep up.

What "Brain Rot" Actually Means, and Why It Isn't New

The term itself predates the internet by more than 150 years. Henry David Thoreau used "brain-rot" in Walden in 1854, comparing a decline in ambitious ideas to the era's real potato blight. Oxford University Press revived the phrase for a different era, naming "brain rot" its own word of the year in 2024 after tracking a 230 percent jump in usage and a public vote of more than 37,000 people. Oxford's full definition: "the supposed deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state ... viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging."

On the show, Proud described the feeling in physical terms. "It's when I realize I've been watching YouTube shorts for 45 minutes and my brain feels slow," Proud said. "It needs a moment to reboot." Pun located the same phenomenon somewhere else entirely: inside language itself. "It's not just the scrolling, it's the language," Pun said. "It's using terms like skibidi or rizz and having them make perfect sense to your friends, but completely nonsensical to anyone else. It's like your brain is just full of references to things that only exist online." Asked whether all brain rot content is really the same, Pun drew a sharper distinction, separating throwaway meme trends from the deeper, referential humor built inside gaming and fandom communities: "It could be about a niche web series, a video game, or even a creator's running gags. Understanding that requires history, you have to have been there to get the joke. That kind of content feels less like rot and more like being part of a subculture."

The show had opened with a quote framing that same cycle in clinical terms. Psychologist Dr. John Mayer's line, used as the episode's "quote of the day," that intense focus triggers a dopamine cycle that "keeps us engaged," doubled as a preview of the hour's central tension: the same reward loop that makes obsessive fandom feel meaningful is the one a feed can be engineered to trigger on command. Asked whether scrolling felt like an active hunt for that reward or a passive habit, one of the guests didn't hesitate: it starts as a hunt, they said, but "the algorithm is so good that you don't even have to hunt anymore... it becomes passive very quickly, and that's when you lose track of time."

Gen Z Built the House. Gen Alpha Is Redecorating It

Much of the episode's strongest material traced how fast the underlying vocabulary is turning over, not just what any single word means. Where Gen Z's slang (slay, no cap, spilling the tea) tended to describe a feeling or claim an identity, the panel argued Gen Alpha's contributions are built to be almost meaningless by design, functioning less like vocabulary and more like a badge of timing. Gen Z came of age alongside Instagram and YouTube, platforms where building an audience still meant one algorithm and a relatively stable set of norms. Gen Alpha was born into TikTok's version of that same machine already running at full speed, a constant stream of hyper-fast, audio-driven, context-collapsing content from a much younger age. The panel's read was that the platform's pace simply became the culture's pace: new slang doesn't need to hold up for a season anymore. It needs to work for a week, get replaced, and repeat.

An Old Panic, Wearing New Data

The conversation also turned to whether the concern around brain rot reflects a real neurological shift or just the latest version of a story adults have told about every new medium, from rock and roll to video games to the novel. What makes this round different, the panel argued, comes down to precision: a television broadcast reached everyone with roughly the same programming, while a short-video feed is tuned to one person at a time, built to hold that individual's attention rather than a crowd's.

Research is starting to catch up to that instinct. A 2025 narrative review of short-form video studies found that heavy TikTok-style use correlates with shorter attention spans and weaker sustained focus, and that adolescents consuming more than three hours of short-form video a day scored roughly two standard deviations below age-matched norms on attention tests. Common Sense Media's most recent census put average teen screen time at 8 hours and 39 minutes a day, up from 6 hours and 40 minutes in 2015, with social media alone accounting for close to 5 of those hours. None of it settles the debate the episode raised over whether adults are missing the creative, community-building "good parts" of the culture their kids are building inside that screen time, but it does confirm the discomfort isn't confined to a podcast studio or an Oxford committee room.

Schools Have Stopped Waiting to Decide

That discomfort has turned into policy, fast. Twenty-two states enacted new K-12 cellphone restrictions in 2025 alone, bringing the total to at least 26 states with laws requiring school districts to limit or ban phone use during the day, according to tracking by Ballotpedia and the education policy group ExcelinEd. Some of the newest laws go further than confiscating phones at the door. North Carolina's policy directs districts to build social media literacy directly into the curriculum, the same approach the episode's own research pointed to, citing an educator's argument that schools "can't just ban the technology" and instead have to "give students the mental tools to navigate it."

A Filter, Not Just a Wall

The most interesting turn in the conversation came when it moved from what brain rot slang means to what it's actually for. Both guests agreed a shared vocabulary that outsiders can't parse cuts two ways. "The community is real," one of them said. "Finding people who understand a super niche reference is an amazing feeling," before describing a meme reference that landed as a blank stare with their own parents, proof, they added, "that it can be isolating in the real world" too. The show's read on the exclusion wasn't that it's the point, but a byproduct: using the right slang works like sending up a flare to the people who will understand it, a way of finding community inside an internet too large and anonymous to navigate any other way.

That's the case this episode ultimately makes for taking a term as disposable-sounding as "67" seriously. A slang word with no fixed meaning, adopted specifically because it has no fixed meaning, was never really about communication in the traditional sense. It was a signal, aimed at two audiences at once: the people already in on the joke, and, as it turned out two weeks later, the editors of a national dictionary.

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