metacrap

In art, as in language, “cutting out the metacrap” means to get at the “core” meaning beneath the “superficial form” of a work; what it seems to be is different from what it means.

1998, John Haiman, Talk Is Cheap: Sarcasm, Alienation, and the Evolution of Language, page 118

In this vein, amusing to hear (the first time) was Lieberman’s recounting how, at an international conference on language, Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst and philosopher, gave a presentation on “the linguistic nature of psychological symptomatology” (“the kind of highfalutin metacrap you like, Kunzman,” Lieberman later commented).

2013, Larry Lefkowitz, The Critic, The Assistant Critic, and Victoria, page 157

People who refer to the metacrap argument are generally advocating “letting the software sort it out” instead of asking people to explicitly tag everything before making any contribution.

2004, Christian Crumlish, The Power of Many, page 246

The contributors may have certain bias and personal agenda (e.g., to allure visitors to a resource) in entering tags not relevant to the resources at all, thus the tags may be a collection of “metacrap” (Doctorow 2001).

2009, Hongwei Zhu, Harris Wu, “Sloppy Tags and Metacrap?: Quality of User Contributed Tags in Collaborative Social Tagging Systems”, in Proceedings of the Fifteenth Americas Conference on Information Systems, San Francisco, California August 6th-9th 2009, page 1