Meme of a young Keanu Reeves with an astonished look on his face and the words, “Whoah...that’s so meta”
29 October 2021
The English prefix and word meta is from the Greek μετα-. The Greek combining form is from the same Indo-European root as the English mid-. The original sense, as it was used in Mycenaean Greek, was probably “together with,” but in later use, the Greek prefix was also used to express sharing, common action, and change in place, order, or condition.
In English, meta- is often used in the sense of beyond, at a higher level. This sense arises out of misreading of the title of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, a work of ontological philosophy that contemplates such concepts as existence, causation, form, and matter. The title is not Aristotle’s but was assigned the work in the sixth century CE. The book was called Metaphysics because it was believed that Aristotle thought the proper order of instruction should be physics first and ontology second. Therefore, the original sense of metaphysics was “after physics.” But given the subject matter, the title was later interpreted as referring to a higher order, to things that were beyond the physical world, and that is the sense of the term in English.
But in recent usage, meta has come to denote things that are self-referential. In the twentieth century, the disciplines of logic and linguistics started using meta- to refer to underlying principles. For instance, in his 1953 book Linguistic Form, Charles E. Bazell wrote:
Universality of application is only one meta-criterion for the choice of criteria.
The world of computing picked up the prefix meta- in the late 1960s. Of particular note is the coining of metadata, referring to information about the data, such as the date a file was last updated. In 1969, Philip R. Bagley wrote in his Extension of Programming Language Concepts:
A second data element [...] represents data “about” the first data element. This second data element we might term a “metadata element.” Examples of such metadata elements are: an identifier, a domain ‘prescriptor’ [etc.].
And in the 1980s, the self-referential sense generalized and came into its own. In an article in the 5 September 1988 issue of the New Republic, Noam Cohen discussed meta and recorded an accurate prediction as to how it would be used in the future:
[Who Framed Roger Rabbit?] is only cashing in on America’s latest social and pop-intellectual trend: self-reference. You see it in the humor of television’s “Gary Shandling Show,” with its highly self-conscious theme song and star (who’s been known to spy on other characters in the sitcom by looking into video monitors). You see it in intensified coverage of the media by the media; last year marked the first time a Pulitzer Prize was awarded to a journalist whose beat is the press. Above all, you see it in the popularity of a once-obscure prefix, “meta,” which has been called in to describe these activities. Hence: “meta-cartoon,” the only word English has for Roger’s brief animation experiment. According to David Justice, editor for pronunciation and etymology at the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “meta” currently is “the fashionable prefix.” He predicts that, like “retro,”—whose use solely as a prefix, is so, well, retro—“meta” could become independent from other words, as in, “Wow, this sentence is so meta.”
Recently, as of this writing, Facebook announced it was changing its corporate name to Meta. But, like most things Facebook does, it is not the first to do them. Not only is it just the latest in a long line of corporations that changed their names in the midst of scandal, hoping their bad reputation would be left behind with the name, but in 2011, the basketball player formerly known as Ron Artest changed his name to Metta World Peace. He would later change his name again to Metta Sandiford-Artest. Like Facebook, Sandiford-Artest had a reputation for bad behavior—he holds the record for the longest suspension for on-court behavior, 86 games.
But I must note that Sandiford-Artest’s name, while pronounced the same, is not the same word as meta. Metta is a Pali word meaning benevolence, amity.
Sources:
American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European Roots Appendix, 2020, s.v. me-2.
Cohen, Noam. “Meta-Musings.” The New Republic, 5 September 1988, 17. ProQuest Central.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2001, modified March 2021, s.v. meta-, prefix; modified December 2020, metaphysic, n.1, metaphysics, n.; modified June 2020, s.v. meta, adj., adv., and n.3.
Image credit: memegenerator.net.