Originally, I thought "meta" came from Mac land, and was the curlicue that they get instead of the windows button on many PC keyboards.
I've also often seen a quip that emacs stands for "Escape Meta Alt Control Shift" - I'm a vim user, so I never thought too hard about this, but emacs definitely refers to the Alt key as "Meta", which makes that a contradiction in terms.
I guess all the nomenclature is just made up and nothing matters...
This confused me, too.
Originally, I thought "meta" came from Mac land, and was the curlicue that they get instead of the windows button on many PC keyboards.
I've also often seen a quip that emacs stands for "Escape Meta Alt Control Shift" - I'm a vim user, so I never thought too hard about this, but emacs definitely refers to the Alt key as "Meta", which makes that a contradiction in terms.
I guess all the nomenclature is just made up and nothing matters...