The meta-society

I have been struggling with a concept for which I am sure a word exists, but which I don't know. The concept is a bit like what you get when you place two mirrors face to face in such a way that you get reflections of reflections, but with the difference that these reflections can go on and on to infinity, until your head spins, while in my examples (see the list below) they are usually limited to a single repetition. More like an echo of an echo, in fact.

Humanities (language, art, etc.):

• Songs about music
• Plays about theater
• Books about writing (and blogs on blogs)
• Photos of photos (and paintings of paintings)
• Talking about talking
• Thinking about thinking
• Learning to learn
• Terminology about terminology

Business, IT etc.:

• Maintaining maintenance
• Automating automation
• Investing in investments, betting on bets
• Managing project management (projects about projects)
• Planning to plan
• Estimating estimation, evaluating evaluations, assessing assessments, rating ratings
• Information about information (meta-data)
• Reports on reports (and apparently, there are even reports on reports on reports ...!)
• Politikerpolitik

Other/general

• Having feelings about feelings
• Having opinions about opinions
• Obsessing about obsessions
• Discriminating discrimination (or being intolerant of intolerance)
• Being judgmental about judging
• Being addicted to addiction
• Making lists of lists
• Exceptions to exceptions
• Arguing about arguing
• Friends of friends
• Liking a like (in Facebook etc.)

There are a few exceptions to the "bouncing once" rule: you can actually learn about learning to learn, and you can have feelings about having feelings about feelings, but I try not to think about those things too much, because - like reflections of reflections - they too make my head spin.

Postscript: just now, at work, I gave some input on giving input. It is contagious.

What's in a name

I think I may have already made remarks, in one of my entries, about one of the many limitations of languages, namely that the same word may mean several different things. The other day I was confronted with it yet again while helping my 6-year-old with her homework. In the course of two simple exercises, we came across four homonyms. And of course, it didn't take her long to ask the "but why, daddy?" question. I explained (carefully avoiding complex issues of etymology and phonetic transcription) that there are only so many sounds but many many things that you want to say, so some words are used for different things. She agreed with me that it would be nice, and much less confusing, if each word were to mean just one thing.

Which reminded me of the fact that I am in a band without a name. We have been talking about the name ever since the band was formed, four months ago, and have already considered and rejected some 40-50 ideas. Some were just plain stupid, of course (proving that you do not need much of a brain to do brainstorming) but quite a few were actually okayish, but were rejected because they get significant number of hits when Googled. Not that I think we have to be absolutely unique, but still: if you want to use the web for publicity purposes, you had better make sure your band's name comes in the top few hits, and that is very hard to do if someone else already occupies that spot.

I even Googled a few less serious ideas out of curiosity (like "Thinking out loud" and "Work in Progress" - two of my trademark phrases) but they already exist.

Several centuries ago, the Swedish botanist Carl Linneaus transposed what his father had done for his family (namely adopt a permanent last name) to taxonomy by introducing binominal nomenclature, thereby virtually solving, single-handedly, the problems of homonyms in the animal and plant kingdoms. Maybe I should go one step further and do the same for band names, e.g. by always adding the origin. In the case, I could call the band "Thinking out loud in Luxembourg" or "Work in progress in Luxembourg". There is just one problem: nobody will ever hit on something like that by accident, which means you have to be well-known before you can become well-known ...