meta /me't*/ or /may't*/ or (Commonwealth) /mee't*/
adj.,pref. [from analytic philosophy] 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}}.