TWTS: The actual reality of "virtual" vs. "online" – Michigan Radio

Before there were online possibilities for how students went to class, we just went to class. For many students, thats simply not the case anymore, especially not during the pandemic.

Given the ubiquity of online learning, this question from listener Veronica Vera comes as no surprise: When we talk about students who are taking classes in school (not in a virtual environment), how do we refer to those classes? In other words, what would be the opposite of virtual classes?

The phrase were seeing the most often is in-person classes, and it actually predates the pandemic. As soon as we started to have online education, we needed a way to talk about non-online education.

Linguists call this a retronym, or a word thats formed to create a new distinction when a new thing comes along. Other examples of retronyms include cloth diaper, analog watch, and landline phone.

You may have noticed how Veronica referred to virtual classes where some of us wouldve said online classes. When it comes to talking about things that exist or occur on computers or the internet, virtual and online have come to be used fairly synonymously.

However, there are people who feel that a distinction between virtual and online should be maintained. Thats because virtual also means to be very close to being something without actually being something.

People in favor of maintaining a distinction would argue that a meeting is still a meeting, whether it occurs in person or online, and that virtual meeting is a misnomer.

As we often talk about on Thats What They Say though, words change meaning over time, and virtual and online are now used synonymously when we talk about things like meetings or education or teaching.

This usage isnt surprising, given how virtual has been used in computing for decades to mean not physically existing but made to appear to exist through software, as in virtual reality.

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TWTS: The actual reality of "virtual" vs. "online" - Michigan Radio