What does “It’s sorta meta,” mean?

Maureen Dowd wrote a review on the recently released movie, “J.Edgar” directed by Clint Eastwood in New York Times November 12 issue under the title, “Dirty Harry meets dirtier Edgar.” Apart from the interest in weird relationship of the FBI’s ‘fearful enforcer’ Edgar Hoover and his protégé, Clyde Tolson, I was caught up with the short phrase, “It’s sorta meta,” in the following sentence:

Some F.B.I. agents who worked with Hoover have been grousing that portraying the feared first director of the F.B.I. as homosexual would “turn Dirty Harry into Dirty Harriet,” as William Branon, chairman of the J. Edgar Hoover Foundation, put it.

It’s sorta meta: the star who played a fictional law enforcement officer breaking rules for what he sees as the good of society makes a movie about a real law enforcement officer breaking rules for what he sees as the good of society.

Dowd’s articles are always ordeal to me because of inclusion of a lot of unfamiliar words to me and her own style of elocution.

I guess “sorta” means simply “a sort of,” but I don’t understand what “It’s sorta meta” means here. It’s a short phrase, but “meta” is an evasive word for me. I’m not even clear with what “meta user” shown on my page of EL&U page means. Would you explain me?

Solution 1:

The prefix meta- is used predominantly in scientific contexts, but it has been extended to other areas when it is, in the OED’s words:

Prefixed to the name of a subject or discipline to denote another which deals with ulterior issues in the same field, or which raises questions about the nature of the original discipline and its methods, procedures, and assumptions.

Thus metalanguage, for example, is the language used to talk about language. The prefix does, however, appear on its own. The meta section of EL&U deals with issues about EL&U and a meta user is one who uses those pages. Maureen Dowd’s use of it seems to me to be unnecessarily modish. She might have done better to have said self-referential.

Solution 2:

What it means in this instance is "it isn't meta at all."

Meta in this fairly recent, casual context is supposed to mean self-referential, or recursive in some way. This is the sense in which my teenagers would use this term. It is not a term which can be applied formally, in the sense that meta can be applied as a prefix, as in "metadata" or "metaphysics". Dowd is trying to be hip by using a term that the youngsters would use. Unfortunately, she's getting it wrong. It is like when the kids use "literally" to mean "figuratively".

What Dowd is actually trying to say is that there is a parallel between an actor and a character that this actor has played. Two things being similar to one another does not make them "meta".

Solution 3:

This question is very difficult because meta means a whole lot in different contexts. It is a pretty nuanced idea and very interesting.

In short, meta generally just means "self-referential." Something that references itself is meta; If a character in a TV show says how much his life is like TV, he is "being meta".

Dowd's description of something meta is only sort-of kind-of a-little-bit meta. It's more about someone writing what they have experience with.

This word, "meta" is a vaguely casual bit of language that comes from the PREFIX meta, in words such as metaphilosophy, metaphysics, metadata, and metalanguage. It is hard to define this in a way that doesn't make sense unless you already know what it means, so I'll just say: applying the prefix of meta to something means "the study or examination of the thing as a whole."

For example, metaphysics is the philosophy of philosophy. Metadata is data about data. Metalangauge is language for discussing language.

On this website, "meta stack overflow" is a sub-forum where one discusses stack overflow itself. It's a forum about the forums.

It doesn't really mean much of anything; you can just sort of apply it whenever you want to indicate something references itself.

Solution 4:

Most of the time when someone says meta, it means talking about the thing that talks about the thing. So meta.english.stackexchange.com talks about the site talking about English. Metadata is data that describes data. In the context of the article, when he says "it's sorta meta" he means that "In an odd way (sorta) when talking about the movie..." It doesn't help that the writer doesn't use great English. But the point he's getting at. Is that when talking about the movie itself (not the contents of the movie), Leo Dicaprio played this role before as a fictional character (possibly referring to his role in The Departed).

Solution 5:

Other answerers have fully addressed "meta", but I'd like to clarify "sorta". It doesn't mean "a sort of", it just means "sort of". It's an adverbial. Its purpose is to weaken a statement; "sorta ..." means roughly "somewhat ...", or "partly ...", or "... in a way", or "arguably ...". A synonym is "kinda" (="kind of"). Both are very colloquial, and very vague; I wouldn't recommend them in most writing. (See http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/sortof.html.)