[1] “‘Meta’ was first popularized by Aristotle, who, in seeking a name for the sequel to his blockbuster Physics, settled on Metaphysics. All he meant by the prefix – Greek for ‘after’ or ‘beyond’ – was that the second book had come after the first. But since the second book was about what lies beyond physical reality, people mistakenly, though plausibly, gave the word its current meaning: ‘Beyond physics.’ ‘Meta,’ by extension, came to mean ‘a level beyond.’

During the last hundred years or so, academics realized that this concept could open up fresh terrain for disciplines thought to have run their course. ‘Meta’ rejuvenated subjects like ethics, literary criticism, and mathematics with ‘meta-ethics,’ ‘meta-criticism,’ and ‘meta-mathematics.’ These specialties study, respectively, the ethics of adhering to an ethical system, the criticism of criticism, and the logic of logical systems. The self-reference industry had been born.”

[2] “Meta first saw a glimmer of its current faddishness in 1979, when a computer guru, Douglas Hofstadter, published the book Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. In this cult classic – which hundreds of thousands bought but few finished – Hofstadter explained how self-reference had figured in the works of the three title characters. The artist M.C. Escher, for example, was fond of depicting logically impossible drawings, of, say, a drawn hand sketching a human hand, or of a painting that contains the gallery in which it is hung. The book’s index included 25 words beginning with ‘meta,’ many of them coined by Hofstadter, who has a near-obsession with Russian-doll ideas. Thus, ‘meta-language’ (a language used to describe a language); ‘meta-intuition’ (an intuition about one’s intuition); and ‘meta-hiccup’ (a concept illustrated when one of Hofstadter’s fictitious characters says, ‘If you are but a hiccup in my brain, I myself am but a hiccup in some higher author’s brain’).”