“6-7!”

Do those numbers mean anything to you? Is it just a numeric sequence? A reference to arguably the best song in “Evita”?

If you’ve spent any time around kids in the past year, it’s probably something you’ve heard enthusiastically shouted, followed by intense giggling. Parents and other uncool old people have been trying to figure out what it means, why it became so popular and, in some cases, how to make it stop.

More frequently pronounced “six, SEH-VENNN!,” the phrase is the latest meme-powered linguistic fad that kids have become obsessed with. It comes on the heels of others like “Ohio,” “rizz,” “What the sigma?” and “aura,” a word I have known for some time now but have been told by my personal sixth grader that I am using wrong.

Honestly, at this point, “6-7″ is probably beginning its fade into obscurity. But I’m interested in why this — and all internet and social media-sourced crazes — became so insanely popular. My suspicion? Because it’s goofy, usually said loudly and adults just don’t get it.

“None of it makes any sense!” said Elizabeth Newcamp, one of the hosts of “Care and Feeding,” a parenting podcast produced by online publication Slate. “Perhaps that’s the point. I think it’s something that connects them and confuses us.”

Like any pop culture phenomenon, the origins of the meme are hard to pin down. The rapper Skrilla released a song called “Doot Doot (6 7)” in February, perhaps a reference to 67th Street in his native Philadelphia. A snippet of the “6-7″ lyric was then used in a viral video referencing basketball player LaMelo Ball’s height. But the internet fire seemed to rage most out of control when it was lit by another viral video of a kid at a basketball game yelling “6-7!” with his friends while making hand gestures.

Newcamp and her co-hosts were so intrigued and befuddled by the whole thing that they interviewed Kate Lindsay, an internet culture expert who hosts another Slate podcast called “ICYMI.” I listened to that episode with rapt attention because I have a 12-year-old and I generally want to know what he’s talking about, even if he doesn’t want me to.

That’s the point, though. “That is how it was intended, to be this different language,” Lindsay wrote in an email. “Adults have a pretty fixed idea about what the internet and social media means to us as a tool, where for the younger generation, it’s a totally blank slate.”

Only in that space, “with their peers, a language develops that we don’t have access to,” she said. “They’re on a totally different Internet.”

Lucy Lopez, one of the “Care and Feeding” hosts, first heard the meme from her middle schooler earlier this year. “But according to my other child who is a sophomore in high school, it was already old,” she said. ”It was very funny, because I got it immediately that it wasn’t supposed to make sense but instead used to annoy older people. I thought it was a song, and then I was checked immediately and asked NEVER to talk about 6-7 again.”

As a fellow fun-killing mother, that tracks. While slang like “aura” and “legit” are “very rooted in reality,” Lindsay said, “with ‘6,7’ the joke is that it doesn’t mean anything.” It’s gotten traction because it escaped the confines of kid world. “If you’re a middle school teacher, those numbers can appear on the board and he loses control.”

But Russell Bartholomee, a Baltimore native who now teaches in Texas, told me, “I actually think it’s harmless and kind of funny. And it’s an easy way to score a laugh when they want to drift.”

For Shady Side’s Shelly Work, who teaches performing arts largely to fifth through eighth grade students at Capitol Hill Day School in Washington, D.C., “it’s a fun way that kids of all ages can connect and have an ‘inside joke’ together. Of course, anything can be annoying when you have students compulsively repeating a phrase absentmindedly, but once I embraced the trend as just a funny little thing that they do, it’s actually kind of charming.”

Plus, she’s heard worse. “It’s nowhere near as annoying to me as skibbidi toilet or ‘What the sigma?’” Work noted. As the mother of a middle schooler with middle school friends, I concur.

“I’ve been most amazed at how it’s spread all over the world. We’ve spent the last month traveling, and it’s part of the secret kid language,” Newcamp said. ”Tokyo, Germany, Netherlands, U.K. — they all know 6,7 and say it.”

As funny as it is, “6,7″ was always fleeting by the time adults identified it. I haven’t been a kid in decades, but I remember the allure of anything popular like that was that it was just for us. And then, it’s gone.

“My 13-year-old says it’s already out,” Lopez said. “Like ‘Mom, why are you asking me this. It’s over.’”