‘That’s really meta,’ said my husband, attempting to imitate a stoned hippie at a festival, but only achieving his usual character role of a tipsy retired major in a Hampstead saloon bar. I had been trying to pin down what people think they mean by meta. The dominant element is the self-referential, as in a review in the Guardian of James Acaster playing a tribute act to James Acaster and ‘making meta-merry in a carnival of self-satire’.
Before we get there, I think we must clear the ground with a brief visit to metaphysic. This was first found in a translation made in 1387 by the estimable John Trevisa, the Cornish-born vicar of Berkeley, Gloucestershire, and Fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford. He took it from the Latin title, Metaphysica, itself from Greek, for the book that Aristotle wrote to be read after the Physics. The Greek title goes back to the 4th century bc and was taken into Latin by good old Boethius in the 6th century ad.
The content of Aristotle’s Metaphysics concerned matters transcending physics. In the ramifying history of meta-, the meanings ‘beyond, above, at a higher level’ produced metapolitics from the 18th century and then from 1929 words like metatheory, ‘theory about theory’.
In 1988 Noam Cohen wrote a piece in the New Republic quoting the lexicographer David Justice predicting meta would function not just as a prefix but independently, as in: ‘Wow, this sentence is so meta.’ Cohen said: ‘If so, you heard it from me first.’ Thank you.
By 1999, Vanity Fair was happily observing that ‘An enterprise such as [the magazine] Brill’s Content is inherently “meta”, since it doesn’t review movies… it reviews the reviewers who review movies.’
This is quite a different concept from the metaverse, which, as the OED puts it, is ‘a hypothetical virtual reality environment in which users interact with one another’s avatars and their surroundings in an immersive way’. But that, I think, is where the Meta trade name originated.
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