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Message: [QUOTE="_why, post: 4584821"] Totally, I always think of meta- as meaning "once removed" in a parallel fashion more than a compound fashion, you know? Rather than strictly saying a "class about classes," I think it's also kind of a magnetic lasso around "classes informed about classes" or "an annex to a class." I guess metadata is straightforwardly "data about data," but data is a simple term. Class has complexities (definitions as well as storage space) which give ambiguity to the meta- part I think. Anyway, if you look at the use of the term on the web, like in naming sites, such as metafilter or metacritic: I don't think it is implied that these sites would be "filters about filters" or "critics criticizing other critics," but simply that they are once removed, culling information from other sites of a similar nature, operating in parallel rather than compoundly. I don't know, I'm just trying to give some other evidence of how elastic that little prefix can be. Maybe such things would be better suited with a super- but I like both English and Ruby for the ways you have a bit of... errr... poetic license, I guess. _why [/QUOTE]