Middle school kids find it subversive to say this, and will insert it in wherever they can. Most don't know where it comes from, having picked up from their peers as a saying ok kids famous for being a saying of kids. Some probably know that it comes from Maverick Trevillian from Maryland, who said it on camera at a youth basketball game, after which it went viral.
I'm suspicious of a kid whose mother named him Maverick, right off the bat. I can imagine being reassured if it's a family name, maybe even taken in honor of the TV cowboy of two generations ago. There are ways out of this. But in general, that mother is telling you something about what she's going to encourage in this child. Still, probably mostly harmless. A bit of a show-off.
But that is only halfway back in the story. Maverick got it from a highly recruited basketball player* in Atlanta who has made several videos using the phrase with the usual "I don't know/ comme ci comme ca/ either-way/ mezzo-mezzo" hand gesture, palms up. He stages being asked questions like "What time is dinner?" or "How do you rate this Starbucks drink?" and answering "Six, six-seven" while his friends laugh. Maverick saw those videos.
The highschool player got the phrase from a highlight film of pro basketball player LaMelo Ball, who is 6'7". In the soundtrack underneath the film is a song by the drill rapper Skrilla called "Doot Doot." In the son he uses the unexplained phrase "six seven" in the context of shooting someone and knowing he is dead. All sorts of stories sprung up about how the two were connected, but someone finally had the clever idea of asking Mr. Skrilla what he meant. It is a reference to 67th St in Philadelphia, where he and his friends hang out. "Six-seven" meant he was going to brag about the killing to his friends in the neighborhood. He wasn't using it after that one time until all this went viral, but now he uses it frequently and his fans go nuts over it.
The middle schoolers mostly don't know any of this upstream origin. It's just something they say that seemed vaguely forbidden at first and is now just an in-slang to show they know what's cool.
*Talen Kinney. I had to look it up. I don't know if he's 6'7"
1 comment:
Of course, it trickled down to the elementary school kids, so now I get to be irritated by my foster kids saying it ad nauseum. Luckily, the frequency with which they use it has lessened recently. I expect will go the way of them saying things like "emotional damage". I knew the provenance of that one, at least.
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