6-7 and Pauly Shore
For most of the fall semester, Cedar, my 7-year-old son, has been caught up in the 6-7 craze, where he and friends run around yelling "siiiix seeeveeen" for no apparent reason. The interwebs has told us it's fun for kids to do this because it means nothing and gets our adult goats so thoroughly. My son and his friends have confirmed this.
Last night, Cedar asked me what things we used to say when I was a kid. I told him all the slang that we embraced was still around today, words including "like," "dude," "radical," "chill out" and more. He told me none of that could be compared to the phrase of his (or this) monent becuase that all means something.
Yeah, "dude" means something, many things. It's true. But doesn't 6-7 now mean something, too?
I wracked my brain really hard to come up with anything that could compare to the 6-7 phrase, something that seemed like nothing and yet carried a lot of weight.
You know what I came up with?
Pauly Shore.
That's right. Catchprases coined by the Mtv personality/movie star are so burned into my brain that they still live there today.
Growing up in rural Nebraska, I can't say I absorbed his colloqualisms or used them in anything but jest, but I remember listening to Shore's various characters and thinking I was learning another language. It wasn't exactly the language of cool, becuase it seemed too far out to be anything but ridiculous, yet what did seem cool was Cali culture and the way all of his characters embraced their unique nature and lived life on their terms, whether those terms made sense or not.
30+ years removed from my adolescence and West Coast forms of 80s and 90's slang, as I have this discussion with my son I think about how slang is just another form of Cen William's translanguaging, a term that also came out of the 80s to describe the way a person uses all the languages at their disposal to express themselves and communicate with others. Six Seven, for whatever else it is (annoying?) is giving kids some way to express... maybe... power (over adults), and maybe unity. And maybe just the silly glee that comes with saying something others can't understand and feeling cool for that.
When we speak the same language as others, we feel more connected, and in connection there's power. And let me tell you, having witnessed this many times in the last four months, there is nothing as unifying as a bunch of random kids at a birthday party finding out they all speak this langauge and becoming friends.
I can't say that Pauly Shore unifed any adults back in the day, but a whole generation of youth connected over his quest for novelty and independence, and I guess that's what 6-7 is doing for the youngsters using that langauge today. They say everything comes back around again. I never imagined I'd be making connections to Pauly Shore in my 40s, through a child, but here I am.
Bitchin', dude.