Less than 30 years after that interview, meta has indeed gone on to serve a standalone function as an adjective for anything that seems to refer to itself with an ironic detachment:īut the play is almost completely devoid of action, making for an excruciating 90 minutes despite director Sam Gold's snappy pacing and Letts' wickedly witty delivery. Justice's prediction was an extremely rare instance of a lexicographer predicting the future. Cohen quoted David Justice, at the time Merriam-Webster's editor in charge of pronunciation and etymology, who predicted that meta could follow retro as a prefix that developed its own meaning as a standalone word, offering the example, "Wow, this sentence is so meta." In 1988, the journalist Noam Cohen wrote an article for The New Republic titled "Meta-Musings," in which he contemplated the increasing frequency of meta- as a prefix. The idea of meta as encapsulated by the adjective is a relatively new phenomenon-and in what may be one of the most meta things that can occur in lexicography, we here at the ol' word factory might have had something to do with it. That ironic detachment, the coy reference to the idea of lamps and lighting up is the essence of meta. But a picture of a lamp that itself lights up is notable because it is distanced from the lamp while still making a witty comment on what lamps do-that is, light up. Karissa Bell et al., Wired, December 2012Ī lamp that lights up would not be notable on its own. Designer Finn Magee's trompe l'oeil is printed on plastic, embedded with electronics, and equipped with a cord and switch. The meta gift of the year: a picture of a lamp that actually lights up. So many things, in fact, can be viewed through the lens of self-reference that meta has taken on its own identity as an adjective. ![]() And metadata is data that helps you further analyze other data-for example, the number of surveys that were taken on a given subject. In its most basic use, meta- describes a subject in a way that transcends its original limits, considering the subject itself as an object of reflection.Ĭonsequently, metatheory is theory about theory metacriticism is criticism about how we critique a work of art metafiction is fiction in which the author takes steps to acknowledge the artifice of fiction writing. The word meta is Greek and means "among, with, after," but we can thank New Latin, the language of scientific nomenclature, for its use prefixing the names of certain disciplines. Some works are more meta than others-the movie Birdman, for example, is a movie about an actor who played a superhero in a movie and who now tries to rekindle his career in theater, and that actor is played by an actor who really did play a superhero in a movie and is now trying to rekindle his career in a movie that looks more like a play than a movie.In its most basic use, 'meta-' describes a subject in a way that transcends its original limits, considering the subject itself as an object of reflection. ![]() In its simplest form, a book in which a character is writing a book or a movie in which a character is making a movie can be described as meta. The self-referencing sense of meta seems especially popular in art. The self-reflection sense of meta has also given rise to the use of the word as a standalone adjective, where meta is used to describe something that’s self-reflective or self-referencing. ![]() One of the more popular uses of meta today is for the meaning best described by the formula “meta-X equals X about X.” So, if we take the word “data” for our X, and add the prefix meta- to it, we get metadata, or “data about data.” A meta-text is a text about texts, metacognition is thinking about thinking, and a meta-joke is a joke about jokes. But that’s still not the meta most of us come across today. When they used it, meta meant “beyond,” “after,” or “behind.” The “beyond” sense of meta still lingers in words like metaphysics or meta-economy. Meta is a word which, like so many other things, we have the ancient Greeks to thank for.
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