A religious news event will soon reveal the word's history, rooted in the Latin limbus, "border." Limbo is a state of uncertainty, neither here nor there, a place of neglect or position of irresolution. "O! what a sympathy of woe is this," said Shakespeare's Titus, "as far from help as Limbo is from bliss!"
Meta definition free#
"One free agent who remained in limbo as the deadline approached," reported a sportswriter for Knight Ridder newspapers, "was St. 5, 1988, titled "Meta Musings," David Justice, then editor for pronunciation and etymology at Merriam-Webster, was quoted as saying, "Meta is currently the fashionable prefix." The writer, Noam Cohen, added: "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.' If so, you heard it from me first." In an article in The New Republic of Sept.
Meta definition full#
Rarely do any of us in the language dodge find it possible to salute a lexicographer who was prescient about a linguistic development a full generation in advance. On (I found it on Metacrawler, a Diogenic searcher of search engines), Stephanie Zacharek reviewed the 2002 film "Adaptation," calling it a "massively self-indulgent metamovie," adding that "if you're so meta that you're completely unimpressed with how meta it is, then you are only reinforcing the movie's point: you've been so meta-consumed by metaculture that you're no longer able to take pleasure in art." In a Times Magazine article three years ago, Laura Miller defined metafiction as "fiction that openly admits it is an artificial creation - as opposed to naturalism, in which art strives to represent real life." The title aptly mocked literary self-absorption: "This Is a Headline for an Essay About Meta." The meta craze in criticism soon reached a point of parody about self-conscious parody. You'll find it in the slums of contemporary literary and art criticism." "It's verbal shorthand that expresses not a depth but an absence of thought. "Meta is part of the unearned irony of the improperly educated postmodern crowd," opines Roger Kimball, an editor of The New Criterion. Not every critic is entranced (or, to get with it, ensorcelled) by such nattering of novelistic narcissism. This self-reflexive vogue, labeled meta-analysis, was gleefully seized upon by the lit-crit set as an addition to the jargon known as criticspeak.
"It's clear to me that meta is in a category of prefixes that have been 'promoted' to free-form status once their portability increases." In 1960, metafiction popped up, describing self-referential novels that dealt with the writing of fiction. What did meta prefix before it learned to stand alone? Peter Sokolowski of Merriam-Webster takes us back to Aristotle's "Metaphysics," "beyond the physical realm," in which a subject beyond empirical evidence is the beginning of theory.
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