Very meta."Ĭharlie Hebdo was-will be again, let us hope-a satirical journal of a kind these days found in France almost alone. 2014īoney was peering into the bathroom, halting me and Gilpin in the hallway. Melissa Rose Bernardo, Entertainment Weekly, 18-25 Apr. As Collette tells Letts: "We're-I don't know-sort of throwing words at each other." How very meta. 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. 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.
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