Some works are more meta than others-the movie Birdman, for example, is a movie about an actor who played a superhero in a movie and who now tries to rekindle his career in theater, and that actor is played by an actor who really did play a superhero in a movie and is now trying to rekindle his career in a movie that looks more like a play than a movie.
That suggests to me that the Latin pre- or Greek pro- could be possible antonyms used in a similar way. An example is Aristotle's Metaphysics which his editors placed after his Physics, and started readers thinking it might mean more than location. In its simplest form, a book in which a character is writing a book or a movie in which a character is making a movie can be described as meta. Meta- comes from Ancient Greek, and in this sense means beyond, with, about or after. The self-referencing sense of meta seems especially popular in art. The self-reflection sense of meta has also given rise to the use of the word as a standalone adjective, where meta is used to describe something that’s self-reflective or self-referencing. In Greek meta- has the literal sense after or beyond, but it too is used in all sorts of figurative senses. One of the more popular uses of meta today is for the meaning best described by the formula “meta-X equals X about X.” So, if we take the word “data” for our X, and add the prefix meta- to it, we get metadata, or “data about data.” A meta-text is a text about texts, metacognition is thinking about thinking, and a meta-joke is a joke about jokes. The Greek combining form is from the same Indo-European root as the English mid. But that’s still not the meta most of us come across today. The English prefix and word meta is from the Greek. When they used it, meta meant “beyond,” “after,” or “behind.” The “beyond” sense of meta still lingers in words like metaphysics or meta-economy. 'higher, beyond ' from Greek meta (prep.) 'in the midst of in common with by means of between in pursuit or quest of after, next after, behind,' in compounds most often meaning 'change' of place, condition, etc. Meta is a word which, like so many other things, we have the ancient Greeks to thank for. meta- word-forming element of Greek origin meaning 1.
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