I've got a feeling that in the case of version/virgin it was more about the accent than the word choice. After all, in Russian it is almost the same: версия, but it has regular s. The way Russians tend to pronounce it may sound like a very hard "zh" making it close to "g" sound.

Also, it would be very sad to see idioms go. If one is learning a language they should learn its idioms too. Every language has them and sometimes it is fun to see whether they are just a direct translations or something entirely different.