Meta, Evitata

The announcement that Facebook is now Meta has been met mostly with ridicule. It will also have little effect.  How many people speak of Alphabet rather than Google? I know two persons who have recently gone to work there, and both speak of "Google" rather than of "Alphabet".

"Meta" is in Greek a preposition or an adverb; of course it is the sense of "beyond", made familiar by "metaphysics" or "metalanguage", that tempted Facebook. However, in Hebrew, some have written happily, it means "dead". And in Latin it can be a noun, meaning boundary or turning point, so that one finds in Horace

sunt quos curriculo pulverem Olympicum
collegisse iuvat metaque fervidis
evitata rotis palmaque nobilis.

Translated by John Conington as

There are who joy them in the Olympic strife
And love the dust they gather in the course;
The goal by hot wheels shunn'd, the famous prize...

I am all in favor of shunning Meta.