THEY’RE BRAINWASHING YOU! (& other secrets that made you click) - Etymology Nerd

Six seven was voted word of the year in 2025 from dictionary.com. Is that cheating? Not even a word. Doesn't mean anything.

Well, you have to understand that whenever a dictionary chooses their word of the year, that's a marketing ploy by big dictionary to sell more dictionaries.

[laughs] Yes.

Six seven, of course, is this reference where if you say it, you can go viral. That's the idea behind six seven. That's the whole joke, that this is a possibility of getting clipped, that you can cash in on the virality of it for your own gain, and dictionary.com played that game. But every single person who did it also cashed in on that. There was a Connecticut House Representative, Bill Buckbee, who said six seven on the Connecticut's, uh, state floor. And all these people are doing the exact same thing as Taelon Kinney, who is the, um, basketball player who started the trend, and all the Gen Alpha kids who are cashing in on it, like the six seven kid. All of it was a ploy for virality, and it is a realization that clip farming is the future of distribution online.

Wow, okay. But it's a word that doesn't mean anything, and is specifically designed to be vacuous and to incite the question, "What does that mean?" Is that, is that unique?

I don't believe that it doesn't mean anything.

Right.

I believe even when something is absurd, absurdity is a meaning, and it's absurd for a reason. It's absurd because it's sort of critiquing the general information ecosystem. It's absurd that this would emerge as a word, but that is the meaning. The absurdity of the word is its own definition.

Ah, okay. So it's a story about... It's, it's a meta word in a way.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

It's, it's all a... It's a knowing wink.

Okay.

By uttering six seven, you're playing into the panopticon.

Rage bait was Oxford's 2025 word of the year.

Right. [laughs] They're also... They were rage baiting with that. They, they're hoping that it sparks controversy. Now when people are commenting about the word rage bait being chosen as the word of the year, that drives the word further on Twitter or whatever, X, excuse me, and, uh, and as a result, more people know about Oxford Dictionaries. You gotta remember, this is big dictionary at work.

And slop was another one as well. So a word describing... A, a word that is sloppy describing something that is sloppy being used for people to complain about the fact that, "Look at the state of language today. It's all... Well, it's slop, actually."

Yeah, I, I like to combat that idea that language is slop or brain rot. Um, there's nothing inherently in a word that's good or bad. It's a tool that you can use. But I think we cast our negative associations of social media onto the language. And, uh, yeah, of course, a lot of the videos we see are slop, but that doesn't mean the words themselves are bad for your brain.