What ‘67’ Reveals About Childhood Creativity
The work of Iona and Peter Opie, two pioneering researchers in postwar Britain, can help us understand
What ‘67’ Reveals About Childhood Creativity
The work of Iona and Peter Opie, two pioneering researchers in postwar Britain, can help us understand the epitome of 2025 memes.
Have you heard about 2025’s word of the year? It’s causing a bit of controversy because it’s actually not a word. “67” (pronounced six-seven) is all the rage with Gen Alpha, a phrase often accompanied by an up and down hand movement.
Though it originated in the lyrics of a song by Philadelphia rapper Skrilla, and even in that context doesn’t mean anything in particular, it has become inescapable in 2025, causing outright bans on the phrase in classrooms as well as extensive head scratching by parents.
The “67” phenomenon has been, much like the rest of Gen Alpha’s vernacular, attributed to algorithms and brainrot culture. But other than its initial spread via TikTok, there’s not much that separates “67” from centuries of absurd, nonsensical kid culture.
This whole “67” thing may be foreign to you, but you probably grew up singing “Miss Mary Mack” or shouting “Kobe!” or drawing a Superman “S” in your notebooks—or something along those lines. These are all examples of children’s culture studied by Iona and Peter Opie. And their work might be the key to finding the meaning within the seemingly meaningless “67.”
The Opies were a British couple who dedicated their lives to the study of children’s folklore, games, traditions, and beliefs.
Their first book was a collection of nursery rhymes, but the Opies published numerous books which fully documented child culture—not as it was remembered by adults later in life, but as it actually was, existing and evolving in real-time.
From the 1950s through the 1980s, Iona and Peter traveled throughout the UK, observing children on playgrounds and in schools, recording their rhymes and interviewing them about their pastimes. They also built up a network of hundreds of teachers, parents, academics, and children themselves all around the English-speaking world, who filled out surveys and corresponded with the Opies.
Thousands of children ended up contributing directly to the Opies’ fieldwork, and their many published books and extensive archive, currently held by Oxford’s Bodleian Library, are an incredibly valuable trove of firsthand documentation of the lives of postwar children in the UK and elsewhere.
The Opies were outsiders to the academic establishment, technically amateurs without degrees, who nevertheless made an enormous impact on the fields of folklore, childhood studies, and ethnology.
Part of their obsession with documenting children’s traditions had to do with refuting an idea, common at the time, that television and mass media was “ruining” childhood. (Sound familiar?)
The Opies proved that childhood culture was as vibrant and alive as it had ever been. Children had their own world of lore and superstition: knocking on their own heads for good luck because of “blockhead,” slang for idiot, meant your head was like wood; avoiding stepping on cracks in the pavement; sitting cross-legged for good luck during exams and tests.
Many of the common rhymes and verses beloved by children were found by the Opies to have originated, much like “67,” in the lyrics of popular music. But unlike the novelty of “67,” one of the most fascinating qualities of this oral tradition was its historical nature. Songs perceived by children to be the hot new thing on the playground actually had their origins in popular songs or poems of decades if not centuries before.
One rhyme was tracked from its origin in a 1725 ballad about a drunken soldier to a contemporary playground couplet in 1954.
Other rhymes and phrases still in
common use in the 1950s had, the Opies discovered, actually originated
in minstrel and music-hall tunes from the 1840s through the 1880s.
The Opies didn’t use the word “meme” because that term wasn’t coined until the 1980s, with Richard Dawkins’ work on “the selfish gene,” but they were essentially demonstrating that these rhymes were memes, being passed along from child to child in a long unbroken chain, being modified somewhat from generation to generation as they mutated to survive.
Though “67” doesn’t rhyme, it has a great deal in common with the memetic rhymes the Opies collected. In The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, they wrote:
“[Rhymes] seem to be one of their means of communication with each other. Language is still new to them, and they find difficulty in expressing themselves. When on their own they burst into rhyme, of no recognizable relevancy, as a cover in unexpected situations, to pass off an awkward meeting, to fill a silence, to hide a deeply felt emotion, or in a gasp of excitement.”
This is the same way Gen Alpha kids today, to their teachers’ and parents’ consternation, drop “67” in the middle of conversations, or laugh uncontrollably when it comes up in math class.
The Opies went on, “And through these quaint ready-made formulas the ridiculousness of life is underlined, the absurdity of the adult world and their teachers proclaimed, danger and death mocked, and the curiosity of language itself is savoured.”
The ridiculousness and pointlessness of “67” is perhaps why it has succeeded so extravagantly as a meme, breaking out of the classroom to become Word of the Year: it perfectly encapsulates everything the Opies understood that kids need out of their private jokes.
So is “67” a sign that screens and algorithms are “ruining childhood” with “brainrot?” Far from it—this trendactually shows that despite a screen-mediated culture kids are actually managing to generate new entries in the playground canon.
Of course now instead of being preserved from generation to generation, these memes are being replaced at the speed of the internet by new rhymes, jokes, and phrases straight from the feed.
Will kids still be saying “67” in 67 years, or will it have been forgotten? Only time will tell.
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