Ashlyn, her 10-year-old daughter, sat next to her with a small grin. “I think it’s funny that she’s really, like, trying to get all of these words into her brain,” she said.
Parents like Ms. Hunnicutt can consult a booming content economy that dissects youth trends for curious adults and marketers.
Take “chopped,” a synonym for unattractive that was covered by The Times, Fox News and Parents.com, and appeared in newsletters including The Culture Translator and After School.
Some with particular proximity to young people — like middle-school teachers and parents — have also made careers of explaining what, exactly, kids mean when they say they are “aura farming.”
If today’s adults seem more anxious to have such terms elucidated for them, that may be because platforms like TikTok have provided unusual visibility into teenagers’ habits.
“There’s so much breathless interest in youth culture, myself included,” said Casey Lewis, who writes After School, a newsletter about Gen Z and Gen Alpha. “And so it’s fun to frustrate the olds.”
Ms. Lewis, 38, wondered whether “6-7” was a bit of a message to the adults who appear nosier than ever: “Let us exist in our own space,” she said.
‘None of Your Business’
As a middle schooler, Violet Paull remembers being peeved when she saw a YouTube video in which an adult man tried to explain a favorite archetype of hers, the scrunchie-wearing, water-bottle-carrying “VSCO girl.” (The trend was named for a photo-editing app that Ms. Paull used religiously.)
“I was like, it’s none of your business — you’re not a 13-year-old girl,” she said.
To be sure, members of Ms. Paull’s generation have also provided plenty of raw material for observers to wonder about, by posting through their upbringings and trying on different identities online. Still, there is a sense among her peers that perhaps they have already been parsed enough.
Now a 19-year-old college student in Annapolis, Md., Ms. Paull thinks that her generation’s in-jokes may have gotten more abstract in an effort to reveal less online, and perhaps to prolong the period of time that those jokes actually belong to the cohort that created them.
She pointed to a genre of brain rot that is “so ridiculously not funny that it kind of becomes funny.” Much of it makes no effort to be legible: One meme that circulated last year featured the text “that feeling when knee surgery is tomorrow,” layered over a blue-tinted image of the Grinch.
This is the kind of post that frequently circulates among Gen Z: surreal, impersonal and basically impenetrable. It is probably blurry, possibly upside-down. It might incorporate an animated movie, a six-month-old snippet of TikTok audio and an Instagram filter from 2010 all in the same post.