Talk:917: Hofstadter

I bet Randall felt so clever when he came up with that acronym. Davidy²²[talk] 01:24, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

IMO he had every right to. ‎79.114.62.187 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Is it worth mentioning that Is Meta is an acronym for "I'm," the first word of the acronym? That seems like it would be in the spirit of Hofstadter and "meta," especially since Hofstadter talks a lot about the meaning of "I" in his books. --108.162.237.117 04:28, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

I would think so. I came here to see about making that edit, including noting that the final "I'm" is both "I AM" (the ultimate autobio!) and also provides self-reference back to the start of the original phrase. Ardaglash (talk) 19:02, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Would "this acronym" imply that the sentence itself is an acronym for something much larger? A biography, perhaps? 108.162.237.218 14:48, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

The acronym of the title text is "tit riots (r)j". I'm fairly sure this doesn't really mean anything, but "tit riots" just made me giggle. 141.101.70.21 11:41, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Should it read “I'm so meta, even this acrostic”? Or did Randall eschew correctness in favor of more readers knowing what the comic's words meant? YatharthROCK (talk) 22:25, 27 November 2015 (UTC)

The explanation is factually incorrect... the prefix "meta" comes from the () Greek preposition "meta" which doesn't mean "beyond" or "out of" but merely "after". It came to mean, as a prefix, "beyond" or "reflexive", in modern european languages, via the latin neologism "metaphysica", supposed to be a translitteration of the title of Aristotle's collection of essays. This mysterious title was given by their first editor, living centuries after Aristotle, and was "ta meta ta physica", that is to say something like : "those [the books] after those regarding nature". As those mysteriously titled books concerned the general principles of reality, (including famously the "god", the divine principle of nature"), the title came wrongly to be understood as meaning "beyond nature". Eventually, the "metaphysics" of something came to be understood as dealing with the principles "beyond" a given domain, hence "meta-studies" or "meta-psychology", etc. It is, however, a mistake made since centuries... --Antinomiste (talk) 19:31, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

The last panel's boustrophedon acronym. "Woah I Think He / Nailed It" is an acronym for "Within", if you read in boustrophedon. 141.101.104.221

This is even cleverer than I think it is. Koro Neil (talk) 01:44, 28 December 2018 (UTC)

So what were to happen if Hofstadter observed himself in his autobiography? 127.0.0.1

For Sale: Hofstadter's Old Baby Shoes