For its Word of the Year, Dictionary.com has selected “6-7” from its list of contenders for terms capturing the Zeitgeist of language and culture over the past twelve months. The meme, phrase and accompanying hand gestures from a nonsense lyric in a song by Philadelphia rapper Skrilla aka Jemille Edwards, titled “Doot Doot (Six-Seven) has been unavoidable. While grammarians have tried to apply several interpretations as to its meaning and etymology—from a reference to a street in the rapper’s hometown or police code, which despite being incorrect have increased its rather enduring lore. Recent marketing campaigns by fast food franchises and rumors that the next AI model will be called GPT-6-7 (surely a sign the trend is about to plummet) have kept the genuinely  meaningless phrase alive.

The artist himself says the meaning is fluid — in a recent interview, he said, “That’s just what my brain thought of when I was making the song … It means a block … but that’s not what it means to everybody else now. So it’s just like, turn something negative to something positive.”

The Wikipedia entry for the much older, fourteenth century English idiom to describe a situation in disarray—“at sixes and sevens”—from the proto-version of gambling dice game craps called hazard has not been updated to reflect this new phenomenon.