www.alphadictionary.com

I wonder how this came to mean something not real, e.g. virtual reality. Is the root not related to "virtu"? Is that not related to truth?

The root goes back to Latin, virtutem, nom. virtus, which seems to have meant efficacy. Wycliff translated "virtue" where KJV selected "power." Computer usage apparently came from a middle ground where something was strong enough that it became virtually something else. His determination to win virtually became bravery.

The shift to computer usage seems to me to shift the meaning to digitally apparent. We were in a virtual conversation could mean rapid texting or Skyping. A virtual world may be one created online, but literary creations such as Lilliput would also count. Fascinating word.

ok! thanks for that. Just realized I was thinking more of veritas than virtu... Ahhh this getting old business is not fun. I don't trust me any more.

OK to trust - but verify...

thanks for the vote of confidence... sort of. 'sort of' is how I have to live it now.

And is a "smart phone" virtually smart because it can perform more functions than I can (the same being true of nearly any man's pre-pubescent granddaughter), or is a camera that can also determine the shortest and/or quickest driving route between Lewisburg & New Monia, Pennsylvania a phone (because in the middle of the previous century) it can do virtually the same thing the kid next door and I could do with two empty creamed corn cans and 50’ of pulled-taut baling-twine?

Damoge noted (on Fri Oct 23, 2015) that:

this getting old business is not fun.

I find that I'm spending a lot more time than I used to reflecting on "the hereafter"; whenever I go into a room my first thought is almost always "Now what did I come in here after?"

My mother had a framed, cross-stitched homily hanging in the kitchen that read

Old age isn't for sissies

I remember that at the time I couldn't make any sense out of it; how truly blissful ignorance can at times be...