I went to collect my daughter from art class and walked into chaos. The entire class was face-down on the floor, slapping the tiles and chanting two numbers: "six-seven." One very patient teacher stood in the middle of it holding a tablet, looking like a woman counting down the minutes to retirement.
They had just watched the Pope do "six-seven."
I'm seventy years old. I had no idea what that meant. On the walk to the car I got the full briefing, delivered at the volume only an eight-year-old can sustain: "I can't believe it — the Pope did six-seven!" So I asked the obvious question. What does six-seven actually mean? She thought about it properly, looked at me dead serious, and said: "Nothing. It doesn't mean anything."
And that, it turns out, is the whole point.
"Six-seven" is the reigning piece of Gen Alpha nonsense — Dictionary.com's word of the year for 2025, no less. It started life in a rap song, got bolted onto a very tall basketball player, and mutated into a hand gesture: two palms turned up, wobbling like the pans of a scale. It doesn't translate. It isn't supposed to. Kids say it when they're excited, when they're bored, when they want to derail a maths lesson, or for no reason at all. The absurdity is the feature, not the bug.
Which brings us back to the Pope. On 16 May, a Genoese priest — Don Roberto Fiscer, the man the Italian press calls "il prete influencer" — lined up a few hundred confirmation kids in St Peter's Square and had them teach Pope Leo the gesture. He copied them, grinning. The video went around the world. Then, a week later, in Acerra, in the scarred heart of the Terra dei Fuochi, he did it again — this time leaning out of the popemobile to a crowd of twelve thousand. He's seventy, same as me. He speaks five languages, and he has just casually added one that nobody on earth can actually translate.
I find that quietly humbling. I've spent fifty years pretending I know what's going on — nodding along in meetings, in conversations, in life. The Pope took the smarter route: hands up, smile, figure out the meaning later. There's a small irony buried in here, too. The fastest way to kill a meme like this is for adults to start enjoying it — the moment we get it, the kids move on. So perhaps the Pope and I have already ruined it just by joining in.
My daughter, for the record, has already lost interest. On to the next thing.
So I'll put it to you, since I clearly can't settle it myself: is "six-seven" the sound of a generation I'm too old to understand — or is my eight-year-old exactly right, and there was never anything to understand in the first place?