Meta is a short way of saying the "strategies used by top teams and players for the current major patch version". This is important because of a lot of what people talk about as "meta" has very little application for a new, average, often even expert players which causes a lot of confusion. Ex. The 'meta' that
Crystal Maiden players should buy a 
Hand of Midas makes close to zero sense in most situations outside pro games. 2-1-2 lanes, or duo lanes
Here, you have a carry and a support in both of the side lanes, with a ganker, semicarry, or pusher in the mid. The idea here is to heavily contest all 3 lanes and hope that you can outplay the enemy and come out with an advantage in the mid game. The mid player is responsible for most rotations, and is generally expected to gank whenever he gets a good rune.
There are some pretty big weaknesses with this style though. First, you have no real options if one lane is getting beaten except to ask mid to try to force low chance ganks. A support will just feed if left alone in his lane 1v2, and a carry is useless if he can't get any farm. If mid is losing, he needs to ask for a gank from the supports, but leaving their carry alone vs 2 people is risky and a gank from 1 support often isn't enough to kill a mid hero who will greatly out level them. Duo lanes also make very poor use of the jungle and have a hard time keeping lane control. On the other hand, you aren't relying on any of your heroes to solo, and in low level pub games you don't always have faith that your teammates won't feed. In a 1-5 system, the safe lane carry is the 1. The hard lane carry is the 2. The mid is the 3, and the supports are both underfarmed 5s because they can't use the jungle.
3-1-1 or defensive trilane
This is the most common setup in pro games. 2 support and a carry are in the safe lane, a semicarry, initator, or ganker is mid, and someone with a way to safely get levels and some last hits 1v3 is in the offlane.
This setup focuses on dominating 1 lane so that the supports have more freedom to move and so that the carry can get a level advantage. The supports are responsible for keeping the enemy offlaner out of XP range, pulling jungle creeps into the lane to deny their own creepwave/farm the jungle, and to rotate to mid and the offlane to look for kill. They try to let the carry have solo XP as much as possible and make sure he has freefarm. The mid focuses on getting a core item up so that they can use their level advantage to dominate the mid game. The offlaner focuses on staying alive, getting levels, and bringing some utility to the team in the mid game. Some examples of offlane heroes would be:
Bounty Hunter (who doesn't need many items to deal good burst damage, gives the team 
Track gold and can get levels while invisible)
Clockwerk (who is a very strong initator with few items and can get farm with 
Rocket Flare)
Nature's Prophet (who can send his trees to mess with the creep wave and block the enemy pull camp and then can provide split push support in the late game).
1-1-3 the aggressive trilane
When one team feels that their supports are much stronger in the early game than the enemy's they can pick a carry who can help get kills early and focus on shutting down the enemy carry in a 3v3 lane. This will lead to a ton of fighting in the offlane, while a solo hero is in the safe lane vs the enemy offlaner. Due to the way the creep waves meet in the safelane, the solo safelane hero doesn't need to be as surviable as a solo offlaner, and is frequently able to get good farm.
2-1-1-1 the jungle trilane
Very similar to the defensive trilane, but with one of the supports replaced with a jungler like
Enigma, 
Chen or 
Enchantress. This lets your team get utility items more quickly but makes it harder to keep the enemy offlaner out of XP range. It also makes it easier for your team to gank middle because the jungler isn't expected to be on the map.
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