Things always tend towards decadence, the bad drives out the good, the future is a bleak vista of diminished horizons. The brain shrinks, all is lost. How to recoup and remember if not through continuous acts of commission, commission of the genetic fallacy, holding to the belief that the original form of something is its more essential or truer or more valuable form?
How to delve into that irresistible magic, that superstition, that at the moment of its creation, something was pure, that there are moments of creation which we can trace in the present manifestation? Without a recording device to re-inspect the origin, how else than through etymological play? And from that play to project a world, a simulated world of sensation that might take us home, that might return us to the moment just before Creation, before the One Long Word was uttered and everything brought into existence.
So take your virtual:
Among the Romans, "virtue" (Latin virtus) meant valor or courage on the field of battle, stoutness of heart in a soldier. It came from the Latin root for man, vir, and so represented something inherently masculine. In fact, the word occurs on the first page of Caesar's Gallic Wars. But by the nineteenth century, "virtue" was reserved almost exclusively as a euphemism for a woman's ability to preserve her virginity before marriage. Aware of this etymology, Nietzsche quipped that virtue, which originally meant virility in a man, had come to mean chastity in a woman. Nietzsche thereby marked the genealogy of the word, contrasted two cultures, and also marshalled evidence for his own genetic fallacy that Western culture had become increasingly feminized, and thus shrunk the arena for (manly) heroism.
Samuel Richardson's sentimental novel about a young woman of virtue, Pamela, published in 1747, was a runaway bestseller of its age, and has been called the first true novel by Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel. In Henry Fielding's slim parody of it, Shamela, written almost as soon as Fielding read the original, the women who scheme to trade Shamela's virginity for marriage to a foolish Squire Booby are constantly swearing "'pon their vartue." This ironic notion of virtue led Fielding to then write Joseph Andrews (the story of a young man of virtue) and later his masterpiece, Tom Jones. In both, heroes become comic figures precisely because they are men intent on preserving their virginity.
Indeed, vir for man is taken from an even earlier proto-Latin root (probably Hindo-Sanskrit or Greek) for stick, twig, or rod and, by metaphorical association, phallus. Which was tenor and which vehicle is lost in time. We can imagine the phallus came before the stick.
Virgins are ignorant (gn = knowing) of the vir.
"Virtual" is attached to the (yet-to-be-invented) technology called "virtual reality." Virtual reality is called that because it is "almost really" real, or virtually real: "that which is essentially true though not formally so." A conflation of vir with the idea of "essence" as in "seminal." In medieval usage, "virtual" meant to be possessed of the power to influence, to have the potential to affect, attached to the idea of Divine influence. What had once meant manliness in a man came to mean godliness in a god.
Finally, this sense is generalized and made as abstract as possible. "Virtually" comes to be equivalent to "essentially": that is, "for all intents and purposes, as far as anything important is concerned, for all practical purposes." To call the computer simulation of reality which tricks our senses into thinking we are some place we are not "virtual reality," is to embed the sell-job in the word, to hype the power of the technology before it is anything but vaporware. It implies that the computer simulation somehow captures the essence of reality, that for all practical intents it is really real. If the medium is the message, then the nature of reality will be seriously and effectively altered inside cyberspace, maybe even essentially altered. In its current primitive state, most implementations seem to induce nausea. Perhaps this technology, spun out of simulations of our nerve net, will redefine the body's relationship to physical sensation. You can't get a "real-er" change than that. So it is very likely, one might say it is virtually true, that virtual reality will be quite the opposite of what its name implies: that is, virtually unreal, as far as essential facts or qualities are concerned.
Manly virility becomes feminine virginity.
Humanness becomes godliness. Corporeal and physical becomes essentializing
and abstract. The code projects a language.