The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Cybermen

These days, if you aren’t wiki or cyber or virtual, you are nothing. You might as well give up and make do with real life, which mankind has been trying for thousands of years without success.

Cyberspace is out of control and filled with cybersquatters having cybersex with cyberpunks. This would make more sense if anybody actually knew what cyber meant, and the answer may come as a shock to cyberpunks, because cyber means controlled – indeed, it comes from the same root as governed.

Back in the 1940s there was a man called Norbert Wiener who was studying how animals and machines communicated with and controlled each other. He decided to call his field of study cybernetics after the Greek word for a steersman. A steersman controls the boat that he’s in: in Greek, he cubernans it. From this the Romans got the idea that a governor who steers the ship of state gubernans it. Even though the B has been replaced by a V in the modern governor, things that belong to the governor are still gubernatorial.

Meanwhile, punk was an early twentieth-century American term for a homosexual, specifically the young and pliable companion of an elderly and implacable hobo. From there, punk turned into a generalised insult and then was taken as a badge of honour by noisy rockers in the 1970s. However, an etymologist can still look at the term cyberpunk and wonder what these well-governed homosexuals are up to.

Another word that has switched its meaning entirely is virtual. Virtual reality, in case you didn’t know, is reality that isn’t real. It’s virtually real, though that’s not much better than being virtually pregnant. But what really bothers the etymologist is that very few of the things that happen in virtual reality are in the slightest bit virtuous.

If one thing is virtually another, it’s because it shares the same virtues. Of course, virtues here don’t have to be moral virtues, they can be physical ones. If I’m virtually asleep, then I’m not asleep but possess the same physical virtues as somebody who is. A virtue doesn’t have to be good: a virtuoso torturer isn’t a good man, he’s just good at his job. It’s the sense of virtue that survives in the phrase by virtue of.

Even though you can now achieve things by virtue of dishonesty, virtue used to be a much better thing. Courage, strength, honesty and generosity all used to be virtues, although few of those survive in virtual reality. In the ancient world, a virtue was anything that was commendable in a person. Well, I say person, but I mean man.

Women can’t be virtuous. A virtue is that which is proper to a man. The Latin for man was vir, and virtus was the Latin word for manliness. Virtue is basically the same thing as virility.

So if a woman were to be virtuous she would become a man-woman, which is a terrible idea. A man-woman might be so bold as to have her own opinions. She might even express them, at which point she would become a virago.

To be fair, virago was originally a word for a heroic woman; but that’s still rather sexist, as it implies that heroism is a purely manly quality. In fact, language is irredeemably sexist; but that’s not my fault, it’s the Romans’. Look at their attitude to women in the workplace.