meta
/me't*/ or /may't*/ or (Commonwealth) /mee't*/ [from
analytic philosophy] adj.,pref. One level of description up. A
metasyntactic variable is a variable in notation used to describe
syntax, and meta-language is language used to describe language.
This is difficult to explain briefly, but much hacker humor turns
on deliberate confusion between meta-levels. See Humor, Hacker.
