Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
TIPPECANOE COUNTY, Ind. — The Tippecanoe County Sheriff’s Office has declared that the war on drugs is over and has been replaced by the war on knowing what the hell kids are talking about.
School resource officers entered a local elementary school on Wednesday, armed with citation pads and ,what witnesses described as, “boomer confidence” to enforce Ordinance 6-7, which entails issuing fake citations to kids for saying “6-7,” a phrase elderly adults find confusing and therefore presumably criminal.
Ugh, that's just so 6-7… Maybe, who knows? (Odd News/Canva)
The ordinance bans “6-7,” the phrase Dictionary.com declared Word of the Year in what linguists are calling “surrender to the inevitability of aging already.” Sheriff’s deputies issued tickets to students caught using the expression or performing its accompanying hand gesture, which resembles weighing invisible options. Officers admitted the gesture “just looks like disrespect” though none of them could identify what was being disrespected or how.
“It is now against the law to use the words ‘six’ and ‘seven’ unless using them in a math problem or someone’s age,” one officer explained to a classroom of students, none of whom had requested that particular clarification. Asked whether nearby Route 67 had been legally renamed, the deputy said the question was “outside the scope of enforcement,” which is cop-speak for “someone didn’t think this through.” One student asked if the rule applied during Bingo. The officer’s pause lasted long enough for the bell to ring.
The ordinance was passed to “keep parents sane during this time,” according to the TCSO, though sanity seems like an odd benchmark for an agency that just criminalized ambiguity. One deputy confirmed the law was conceived during lunch after someone’s teenager responded to “What do you want for dinner?” with “6-7,” an interaction the department characterized as “linguistic assault on clarity.” They refused to address the question of whether or not unclear communication between teenagers and authority figures constitutes a new phenomenon or is possibly as old as human history itself.
Students responded to the crackdown with full compliance, meaning they continued saying “6-7” over and over again while racking up tickets. The citations carry no legal weight, which places them in the same enforcement category as most actual county ordinances. Sheriff’s officials acknowledged the tickets were “symbolic,” a term they defined as “we have an Instagram account now and this seemed like content to us.” The connection between symbolism and Instagram metrics was never established, but seemed deeply felt.
One student photographed holding a ticket appeared psychologically intact, possibly because growing up under adult governance builds resilience to arbitrary authority. Another student asked whether calculators could still display 67. The deputy froze, stared into the middle distance, and finally said, “Maybe.” The calculator question has not been resolved. Legal scholars were not consulted because this is a sheriff’s office in rural Indiana.
The crackdown follows a pattern of police departments addressing generational communication gaps by attempting to criminalize them. Asked if they’d considered the traditional approach of ignoring slang until it dies naturally, a spokesperson said that wasn’t “consistent with department visibility goals.” The visibility goals were not explained. They did not need to be.
Millennial parents expressed concern, but then remembered they said “random” for six years straight, and their parents didn’t criminalize it. GenX parents reportedly responded to the ordinance by saying “89,” a reference no one in the room understood, either, but which seemed to defuse tension. Boomer grandparents applauded the measure and suggested expanding it to include TikTok dances and referring to things as “valid.” The boomers were gently ignored and told to log off Facebook, as is tradition.
The phrase “6-7” originates from online culture and essentially means nothing, which places it in the same semantic category as most online content produced after 2019. It is pronounced “six-seven,” not “sixty-seven,” a footnote in a pronunciation guide that now exists in official police training literature, which represents either dedication to craft or evidence of institutional collapse. Deputies are now required to attend a four-hour seminar on identifying prohibited slang, though the curriculum was reportedly outdated before the first session concluded.
The ordinance does not address “sendy,” another term that has melded with “6-7” to create what linguists describe as “compounding semantic emptiness.” When informed that new slang would inevitably replace the banned phrases, the TCSO said they were “prepared to stay vigilant,” which is department code for “we’ll find out about it three months too late after it peaks, take inappropriate action, and get roasted in the media for it.”
The law will remain in effect until someone’s kid says something even more annoying, which officials estimate will occur any minute now. The sheriff’s office has scheduled a press conference to declare victory regardless of the outcome. Tickets will be archived in a filing cabinet next to the department’s unused body camera footage and applications for community oversight.
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