Do you have a better suggestion on how to name it? I was looking for a word that does not include 'meta' as a substring (I think it is already used too often in different contexts) and that reads well and tells what it is used for. #description was the best thing I could find. In real live I only observed once having an accessor that was called #description and then I could change that together with the author to be something like #summary. I think every method extension sooner or later conflicts with existing software. Another thing, probably out-of-topic in this thread, is how you should call accessors, if you have an object referencing an external description, such as MAValidationError. I simply called it #description, even-tough this description does not describe the receiver. I probably should have called it #actualDescription or #targetDescription or #externalDescription or ... I was too lazy at the moment. However this problem stays the same, even if I replace the #description-prefix with any other.