Six-seven, sigma, unc — what the kids are saying behind your back

Times

a day ago

What is the meaning of six-seven? This is the question of the hour, asked in countless Google searches by people trying to decipher the sayings of Gen Alpha, the generation born after 2010. I could Google it too, but you can't trust the engine these days.
Better to make like an etymological Philip Marlowe and collar a few Alphas to see if they will talk. Then see if you can understand it. There are several in my house. 'What does sixty-seven mean?' I ask them.
They have no idea but think it might be rude. I think the same thing. There's a Martin Amis novel where a teenager asks a girl for a sixty-eight. 'You do me and I owe you one,' he says. I guess it's something like that.
'We actually have three Gen Alpha girls here who are happy to help,' says my upstairs neighbour.
I take the stairs, bringing the question with me. I feel like the man in the old French beer commercial who sees figures written on his mirror and asks himself: ' Que signifie 1664? ' A six and a seven, I say, between breaths. Does it mean anything to you?
The Alphas bolt upright. 'Six-seven!' they shout, waving their arms around. 'Six-seven!'
'It's the song,' says the taller one. I'll call her Mel (I'm changing everyone's name). The song is by the rapper Skrilla, she says. 'Six-seven,' he exclaims, halfway through. 'Then there was this famous basketball player called LaMelo Ball,' says Mel. 'He's six foot seven.' People set video of him to the song. 'Any time you mention six-seven people go crazy,' says Mel.
'I can't even count to ten,' says Dina, her comrade on the sofa. 'It's ruined.'
'Oh!' my children say later. 'Six-seven! Why didn't you say so? You said sixty-seven.'
My children have some intel, but not much. They know, for instance, to say 'bet', when they mean absolutely, and 'no cap' when they mean 'no lie'. They all say they are 'cooked' when they mean they are out of luck. When I ask about 'aura' the ten-year-old jumps to his feet and starts pacing the kitchen, talking about how aura means cool and involves a points system of some sort.
When I say mewing, they suck their cheeks in and stroke a finger along their chins, for apparently, it means sticking your tongue against the roof of your mouth to emphasise your jawline.
But they are not sure about 'huzz' or 'chopped', or 'unc', or 'type shit'. All 12 and under, they are a little young.
Mel and Dina are 14. Talking to them after my children is like leaving your dial-up modem and getting on to a 5G network. I've brought some vocabulary I have sourced from Your Teen Magazine and a California high-school newspaper called The Wildcat Tribune: a list of words thought, for sure, to be Gen Alpha. An Alpha-bet.
'Huzz' means girls, says Mel. It can be derogatory, it can mean that they are hot. 'Like, oh there's huzz over there,' she says. There is 'bruzz', for guys.
'Fat kids at my school get called 'fuzz',' says Dina. It is still not a bed of roses, being in middle school.
'Unc' means an old person. 'It's like uncle,' says Dina. 'It's like someone's above the age of 20. Like, OK, I'm an unc now.'
'Like, 'OK boomer' for Millennials,' says Mel's father, a Gen X-er, leaning against the sideboard.
'Like, 'Unc lost so much aura, for real,'' says Mel.
'Aura is like a really weird way to describe cool things you do,' says Dina. She is small and talks fast, machine-gunning us with Alpha vocab. 'People say I'm chalant,' she tells me at one point. It's the opposite of nonchalant.
'If you are walking down a hallway and you trip, that's negative aura,' she says. 'People used to make these TikToks, like, 'Dropping your pencil on the floor, negative 1,000 aura.''
'Yeah,' says Mel. 'Like, 'The huzz liking you back, plus 1,000 aura.'
'And then aura farming is like, you purposefully do something, you complete tasks to gain aura,' says Dina.
'Some people call it aura harvesting,' says Mel. 'But that's like, elite.'
'Type shit' means 'for real' or 'sure', says Mel. 'Like, you say, 'Do you wanna go on a two-man?' They're like, 'Type shit!'' Hold on. A two-man?
'A double date,' says Mel.
'Not a double date,' says Dina. 'It's just like a hook-up, OK? But people are using two-man and double date now interchangeably. It's like, 'No, you are going to Chipotle.''
She shakes her head, as if she wonders what the world is coming to.
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Some of the words on my list are rather old, they tell me, and more like something a Gen Z person would say. I bring up 'dog water', if you'll pardon the phrasing. It means substandard.
'That's so like, 2019,' says Mel. It's as if I'm speaking Latin.
Don't even mention 'mother'. That is older than the hills, apparently. It is used by Millennials talking about their idols, says Mel.
'Yeah,' says Dina, with a slight eye-roll. 'Like, ' Taylor Swift is mother. Beyoncé is mother.''
We discuss 'sigmas'. Mel explains: 'A sigma is like, you're your own thing, you're a lone wolf. Sigma males are like, they respect women but they don't baby women. But beta and omega males, they baby women.'
Oh to be a sigma. Philip Marlowe is sigma. So is Mr Darcy. So is my wife, apparently. 'You're so sigma,' a younger colleague told her at work the other day when, during a crisis, she did not freak out. 'You get everyone to do what you want without even saying it.'
Dina and Mel say that there are also 'Masons': a name, a profession and apparently, a whole class of teenaged boys. 'It's like, a genre,' says Mel. 'They have fluffy hair and the ice-cream shorts and they say they're obsessed with God but they hate on women all the time.'
I run all this past a few other experts. 'Mason is like a stereotypical white boy,' says Mira, an elder stateswoman of the Gen Alphas at 15. 'They talk about God but they also tend to be super-homophobic and transphobic and all that stuff.'
Use these words ironically, says Nora, 15, who feels that she is Gen Z. 'I know plenty of people who don't, but you're like, 'OK, you're kind of braindead.''
I call a 12-year-old in France. 'If someone calls you a sigma, it's because you have lots of aura,' she says. 'Sigmas have the big jawline and the aura points and everything.' Wait, this is in France, too?
'Yeah, yeah,' she says. 'They say, 'Points d'aura.''
She throws in a few French ones while she's on the line. ' Wesh for 'yo', grave for yeah, totally, gênance for embarrassing, and if something is really gênance and rubbish you can say éclaté au sol,' she says. 'The translation is 'exploded to the floor'.' Sometimes, for emphasis, she says: éclaté au troisième sous-sol. 'Like, it's exploded to the third underground floor. The one I use the most is, 'It's exploded to the basement of your grandma.''