To all the millennials I called cheugy, I’m sorry

‘6-7’ has been banned in classrooms across the US because teachers can’t even count without triggering fits of laughter. Representational pic/iStock

In 1979, British biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term meme which was short for memetic. He defined it as cultural information spread through imitation. The word stems from the Greek mimema, meaning "to copy" (hence mime, miming, mimicry - the whole mim family). Being a biologist, Dawkins thought of memes as cultural equivalents of genes: they replicate, mutate, and evolve through natural selection. So, memes are the DNA of our culture.

Over time, though, memes evolved a sense of humour. For something to qualify as a meme now, it has to be funny. But the essence remains the same: memes still transmit culture. They're like carrier pigeons, delivering tiny fragments of shared meaning. So it does disappoint me a little bit to see how Gen Alpha's memes carry no information at all.

Last week, Dictionary.com named 6-7 the Word of the Year, a word it couldn't define. Because there's nothing to define. It's just two random numbers that children chant endlessly. The meaning changes depending on the context. Both "How are you doing?" and "What's your height?" can elicit the same answer: "6-7". In classrooms across the US, it's been banned because teachers can't even count without triggering fits of laughter. The joke, apparently, is that there is no joke. The humour lies in the confusion of everyone who doesn't "get it".

Making fun of older generations is nothing new. In 2020, we (Gen Z) came for millennials with our whole chests for their side parts, their Harry Potter obsession, and their refusal to move on from the '90s. We called them cheugy - out of touch, uncool. But at least our mockery had some substance. Our memes were rooted in something. We had Tumblr text posts that read like existential poetry, 2016-2019 YouTube drama, stan Twitter meltdowns, and the chaos of Dhinchak Pooja. We had range.

Gen Alpha, on the other hand, might be the first generation raised entirely by AI. They're growing up on what some call a "dead internet", a place where most content is algorithmically generated, not human-made. Our memes were funny because they came from real people doing real things. Someone actually filmed "Gordon Ramsay's idiot sandwich" or sang Pen Pineapple Apple Pen. Another human edited it into "Memes That Keep Me Up at 4 AM" and uploaded it to YouTube, where a very real me discovered it at 4 am and laughed till sunrise.

Now, when memes like Ballerina Cappuccina or Skibidi Toilet dominate the feed, I struggle to find the joke. Once you realise the thing making you laugh was written by a bot, recycled by another bot, and is probably being recommended by a third, the humour dies fast. These memes aren't mirrors of culture anymore, they're just empty noise.

If you couldn't tell already, I'm a bit of an etymology nerd. Nonsense words have always fascinated me. I remember reading Lewis Carroll's poem Jabberwocky. Though most of its words are gibberish, the reader instinctively understands the story. The word chortle, a combination of chuckling and snorting, was used in this poem for the first time ever. And chortle resonated so much that it entered the lexicon. That's the power of language: even chaos can communicate.

In fact, nonsense is how words are invented. Shakespeare's the legend of this industry, credited with inventing 1700 words or so. In Julius Caesar, he described the king to be generous, a word English speakers didn't know before. Today we come to know it as a kind and giving person, the very qualities of Julius Caesar.

Then came the Dadaists during World War I, who looked at global chaos and said, "You know what? Let's fight nonsense with more nonsense." Hugo Ball's poem Gadji Beri Bimba is literally gibberish, but it meant something. It was rebellion, resistance.

So yes, there is a way to strip words of meaning and still make them matter. That's exactly what's missing from 6-7. There's no intention, no satire, no spark. Maybe that's what 6-7 really represents: the death of meaning itself. And if that's what makes Gen Alpha laugh, maybe the rest of us are right to worry that the internet's brain rot is real.