What’s a word or phrase that annoys you?
I teach middle and high school, so this is not exactly a difficult prompt.
There are plenty of contenders.
“I didn’t do nothing.”
“Do we have to write in complete sentences?”
“Is this for a grade?”
“What are we doing today?” — usually asked while the agenda, objective, assignment, due date, directions, and possibly the secrets of the universe are written on the board in letters large enough to be seen from orbit.
But right now, the phrase that annoys me most is not even really a phrase.
It is “6-7.”
Or “six-seven.”
Or whatever spelling best captures the sound of a classroom briefly losing its will to live.
To be clear, I do not hate student slang. Student slang is part of the natural weather system of a school. It blows in, swirls around, knocks over a few chairs, then disappears just in time for something even dumber to replace it.
Every generation has had its nonsense. Adults complained about “groovy.” They complained about “rad.” They complained about “awesome.” They complained about “whatever.” Then came “YOLO,” “slay,” “rizz,” and enough TikTok-born vocabulary to make Noah Webster rise from the grave, look around for five minutes, and quietly return to the grave.
So I am not pretending my generation spoke only in polished paragraphs and Shakespearean couplets. We had our own verbal junk drawer.
But “6-7” is different.
Most slang at least tries to mean something. It may be silly. It may be overused. It may make adults age twelve years every time we hear it. But usually there is some kind of purpose. A joke. A description. An insult. A compliment. A reaction. A little verbal shortcut that communicates something to the people who are in on it.
“6-7” seems almost aggressively uninterested in meaning anything.
It is not a joke with a punchline. It is not a useful word. It is not even a complete thought. It is more like a noise that escaped from the internet, wandered into a school hallway, and found permanent shelter in the mouths of children who have math next period.
One student says it.
Another student laughs.
A third student repeats it louder.
A fourth student, who has no idea what is happening but refuses to be left out of the cultural moment, says it too.
And suddenly whatever fragile educational momentum existed five seconds earlier has been buried under meme rubble.
The especially strange thing about “6-7” is that it did not begin as some innocent classroom invention. It came through the song “Doot Doot (6 7),” and one widely discussed interpretation connects the number to darker street slang. By the time it reaches my classroom, though, all of that context has been stripped away. Whatever it may have meant somewhere else has been sanded down into pure noise.
That may be the most modern thing about it.
A phrase leaves one world with a particular context, travels through music, gets chopped into a meme, gets flattened by TikTok, gets repeated by athletes, streamers, middle schoolers, and bored seventh graders, and eventually lands in an English classroom where a teacher is just trying to explain why “This shows the theme because it does” is not analysis.
By then, nobody really knows what it means.
Nobody needs to know.
Meaning is beside the point.
The point is interruption.
That is what makes it annoying. Not the words themselves. Not even the numbers. I have no personal grudge against the numbers six or seven. They have done fine work over the years. Six has given us six-packs, six strings, and six innings of a pretty good baseball game. Seven has given us seven days in a week, seven seas, and seven-inning doubleheaders back when Major League Baseball briefly decided to annoy everyone.
But together?
In the mouths of students?
During class?
They become a verbal smoke bomb.
“6-7” is what a student says when the room has gone quiet for almost two full seconds and that silence must be destroyed before learning can sneak in. It is what someone says when the assignment has begun, the directions have been given, and the first faint signs of actual thought are beginning to appear. It is the sound of focus being tackled from behind.
And the worst part is that fighting it almost gives it more power.
If I ignore it, it spreads.
If I react to it, it wins.
If I ask what it means, I have given the students the greatest gift a teacher can give them: proof that I have heard the thing, noticed the thing, and am now unwillingly part of the thing.
At that point, I might as well put on a party hat and pass out cupcakes.
That is one of the quiet humiliations of teaching. We are often the last people invited to the joke and the first people forced to live with it. Students absorb these things online at the speed of light. Teachers encounter them later, in the wild, usually in the middle of a lesson, when some child mutters a mysterious sound and half the room reacts like someone just delivered the Gettysburg Address of comedy.
Then we have to decide whether to investigate, ignore, redirect, confiscate, sigh, pray, or pretend we did not just hear a chorus of children chanting numbers for no apparent reason.
I know this will pass. That is the great comfort of student slang. It is immortal in the moment and extinct by breakfast.
One day, probably soon, “6-7” will vanish from the hallways. Some student will say it, and instead of laughter, he will receive the deadliest response known to adolescence: silence. A phrase that once seemed unstoppable will suddenly be embarrassing. The same kids who shouted it forty-seven times a day will act like they never participated. They will look at the poor soul still saying it with pity and disgust, as if he has shown up to school wearing a powdered wig.
Then something else will take its place.
Something louder.
Something dumber.
Something that will make me miss “6-7,” which is a sentence I hate even typing.
So what word or phrase annoys me?
Right now, it is “6-7.”
Not because I do not understand that language changes. I do. Not because I think students should speak like 47-year-old insurance adjusters. They shouldn’t. Not because I believe every sentence uttered in a classroom must sparkle with academic purpose.
It annoys me because it is the perfect modern classroom phrase: loud, contagious, meaningless, and somehow completely immune to extinction.
And by the time I finish writing this, they will probably have moved on to something worse.
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Copyright © 2026 Doug DeBolt
This is both hilarious and painfully accurate. Classroom slang really does feel like a living organism with a very short attention span.