How I Learned to Relax About Gen Alpha Slang

I’m not alone in my confusion. According to surveys released last year by language education platform Preply, over half of boomers (53 percent) and 30 percent of Gen Xers are mystified by the slang used by younger generations. And 54 percent of us are worried that we’re using slang the wrong way and making fools of ourselves.

OK, But What Even Is “67”?

The number first shows up in the chorus of “Doot Doot (67),” a viral track by Philadelphia rapper Skrilla. In Skrilla’s original usage, 67 likely nods to police code 10-67, which is often used to report a death — a touch bleak. Right around December 2024, as the song was taking off, high school basketball phenom Taylen Kinney essentially invented the official “67” hand gesture. In a clip from his Overtime Elite team, a teammate asks him to rate a Starbucks drink out of 10. Kinney responds, “Like a 6... 6... 67,” while doing a wobbly, indecisive weighing gesture. Shortly after, he folded the song and the gesture into his TikToks for his million-plus followers, and it took on a life of its own.

So what does “67” actually mean? It means nothing and everything simultaneously. Six-seven is gloriously ambiguous. It can mean "good,” “bad,” “lol,” “meh” or “I do not want to explain my day to you, father of the Old World.” Like all great teen slang, the point is less about definition and more about vibe.

Relax, It’s Not for Us (and That’s Kind of 67)

This linguistic situation brings me and a legion of fellow Gen X parents and boomer grandparents to an impasse. Do we cram for a pop quiz in Gen Alpha slang? Do we teasingly use it back at them? Do we just nod knowingly like we are at a Radiohead concert and pretend we understand what is happening?

I called in experts, secretly hoping they would say, “You are absolutely right about this. Your kid is bananas. The youth are ruining language and also probably democracy.” Tragically, science did not back me up on this theory.

“It’s somebody else’s language,” says Grant Barrett, a lexicographer for several Cambridge dictionaries and the vice president of the American Dialect Society. “It’s why business jargon often annoys people. We don’t feel included. And that’s a natural human response. But it doesn’t mean that the language itself is bad.”

Jessica Rett, a professor of linguistics at UCLA, explains that it’s part of a larger effort among younger generations to distinguish themselves from the culture of their parents and grandparents. “They do this in a bunch of different ways. They change the music they listen to, they change the fashion they wear, and linguistically, by changing the language they use,” she says. “This all works to do exactly what they want it to do: It delimits their people from other people, and it insulates them from infiltration.”

It works so well that even Rett, 43, sometimes feels confused by it. “If you were to spend time, like I do, grilling 20-year-olds about slang, you still wouldn’t get it all, and certainly not all of the nuance,” she says.

That nuance comes across not just in the slang they use but how they say it. Rett describes it as bidialectal. In other words, they use different dialects, or registers, to talk to their peers than they use when speaking with parents or grandparents. “So it’s unlikely the older generations will be put in a position where they absolutely have to understand slang, and that’s fine,” Rett says. “Kids these days already know they need to interpret us differently than they do their peers.”

Of course, we’re not just trying to understand our kids. When slang leaves you in the dark, it’s hard not to wonder, Are they making fun of us? Is “67” some big joke at our expense?

Just think about the slang of your youth and what your parents and grandparents must’ve thought. For boomers, older generations must’ve been mystified when you said things like “I’m going to split,” “You’re a square” or “Don’t harsh my mellow.” Imagine them staring back at you, slack-jawed, wondering, What is this young whippersnapper even talking about?

For my generation, the Xers, my parents couldn’t make heads or tails of us. The first time I told my dad to “take a chill pill, dude,” I thought he was going to kick me out of the house. They never did make sense of slang like “vibing” or “homeslice,” or the difference between “phat” and “fat.”

Rett, in her attempts to explain “skibidi” to me, put it in perspective. “Its meaning is ineffable, or hard to define,” she explains. “ ‘Skibidi’ is more like ‘wack’ in this respect — its main function is to express heightened emotion, so that emotion can be either positive or negative. If I say, ‘That’s wack’ to my friend, it could be either super cool or messed up.”

It was a light bulb moment for me. Of course, 67 is just the new wack, a nonsense word term I used extensively in my youth. It wasn’t meant to make fun of my parents or alienate them. I loved it because it was slang that belonged to me and my friends alone. If my dad had started a conversation at dinner by saying, “Work was totally wack today,” it would have taken away all of that word’s power and its fun.

Yesterday, when my son came home from school and gave me the typical summation of his day — “67” — I didn’t get angry or confused or make fun of him for his ridiculous vocabulary. I just nodded and said, “That sounds wack.”

He stared back at me, astounded. “Um, OK,” he said, barely suppressing a grin. I must’ve sounded as crazy to him as he did to me. So we had something in common.

It’s not much, but it feels like he and I are actually communicating for the first time in a while.