Meta, Not Quite Morphosis, Level

It is quite easy to mishear the opening lines of the Rolling Stones' classic Honky Tonk Women as 'Meta gin-soaked, bar-room queen in Memphis', when all that the singer describes is meeting one of those lovely ladies who won't take no for an answer. It is, however, quite impossible to replace the company name of the social media queen headquartered in Menlo Park, California, with 'Meta' in one's head. For starters, the reason cited for the name change - it would better 'encompass' what it does: focus on things beyond social media into the metaverse, the whole honky tonk range of augmented reality - is a bit... meta. It sounds good, even beta, but only to nerds. Just ask people what the search engine Google's parent company is - without Googling.

'Meta', in its modern, esoteric noun sense, means 'showing an explicit awareness of itself' - e.g., 'Sometimes this column is so meta, I don't get it.' In the olden days, it was deemed 'pomo', 'postmodern'. In the older days (read: ancient Greek), it was a prefix meaning 'beyond'. But this corporate name change is no big meta morphosis. Zucka may have checked his Facebook in between senate hearings, and stumbled on 'Meta gin-soaked bar-room queen...'. That's probably how, after someone heard the Mohammad Rafi-Shankar Jaikishan hit from the film Junglee, Yahoo! was named.