Two students were talking after class. One of them said something was “the new meta.” It was a sweep, or some other reversal from bottom, I don’t remember which. The other student was new and wasn’t sure what was being talked about. The first student said, “Oh, meta just means it’s the hot thing right now.”

I didn’t say anything. But I noticed. I think he heard it somewhere, and it stuck the way words do when people say them with enough confidence. You just assume you know what it means because whomever you heard it from sounded like they knew what it meant.

The word comes from meta, meaning something about the thing itself. Data about data is metadata. In jiu-jitsu, meta is short for metagame. The games within the game. Chess players use it, poker players use it, competitive gamers use it. It’s not about what’s popular or trendy at the moment. It’s asking something else while acknowledging how everyone else is playing the game right now. What is the correct response?

The idea is older than poker. Sun Tzu wrote about it a long time ago. A boxer who studies southpaws before the fight isn’t studying boxing. He’s studying the metagame of that specific opponent. A wrestler who goes for an early single leg against a berimbolo guy does it because he knows the jiu-jitsu guy wants to get to his back. These are different games, but the same instinct. You do the thing your specific opponent can’t answer. You’re not looking for what looks impressive in a vacuum.

Leg locks didn’t become meta because they looked good on Instagram. They became meta because once leg entanglement systems got good, you couldn’t ignore leg attacks anymore. A trend means a lot of people are doing something. Meta means something different. It means you have to answer this or you’ll fall behind.

Most people use the word to describe popularity. It’s the same thing happening with ecological dynamics and CLA, specific things that aren’t the same, but now used interchangeably by guys who watched one YouTube video to mean we played a bunch of positional games.

None of these words are wrong on their own. Metagame is a real concept. Ecological dynamics is a real thing. The problem is what happens to a word once it leaves the room where it meant something and starts getting passed around by people who liked how it sounded.

Even Lachlan Giles has a website called Submeta. Sub is a prefix. Meta is a prefix. That’s two prefixes with nothing left in between, and he knows nobody buying the product is going to know enough to care.

One student will be training in ten years. The other’s going to need to find the next trend. Trends go out of style. Understanding doesn’t.