Anonymous asked: Hi, sorry to ask a stupid question but I really do not understand what "meta" means. Could you explain? Went to dictionaries and stuff but I didn't really understand it.

If it’s a stupid question, I’m stupid too, because I’m not a hundred percent sure myself. Technically, in the prefix form “meta-“, it means an abstract concept one level higher than a related concept. The internet has adapted it slightly to mean something closer to “self-aware” or “self-referential”, especially of art or literature.

Metadata (on a computer file) is data about data; the file is already data, but metadata is data like when the file was created and what format it’s in. A joke about jokes, a meeting about meetings, or a fanfiction about fanfiction would be meta.

Sometimes people use it in place of “ironic” or “off-topic”, but I don’t think that’s quite right. Um, I hope that helped you, because I think I’ve just confused myself more.