in primary school, the 'common people' had adopted none of the archaic usages. They were happy to use newly coined Katharevousa terms for modern inventions, and some (though not all) alternatives for loanwords, but the trickle-down of Ancient Greek grammatical forms into the language of ordinary people that Korais and Vyzantios had hoped for simply did not happen. It seemed that the scholars had greatly overestimated the influence of the written word on everyday speech patterns. In fact, instead of closing the gap by gradually pulling demotic up to its own level, Katharevousa was moving away from the spoken language, widening the gap and leaving the 'common people' behind. As a result, while many Greeks could read (or at least puzzle out) the Katharevousa in official use, only a minority could now write it with any pleasure or confidence. It was far from the universal standard language of Korais' vision; writing itself was becoming the preserve of a small elite. By the 1870s, it had become a matter of serious concern. In the Ionian Islands, always less impressed by the social status of Katharevousa, Andreas Laskaratos wrote in 1872 that "the logiόtatoi [pedants], the enemies of the nation, while pretending to speak to the nation in a language better than its own, are speaking and writing in a language that the nation does not understand, [with the result that] it remains untutored, ignorant and barbarous, and consequently betrayed by them". A decade later in Athens, among the logiόtatoi, even the young Georgios Hatzidakis (newly appointed assistant professor of linguistics at Athens University, and later to become Katharevousas greatest defender) had come to recognize the problem. In one of his earliest published pieces (in the magazine Estia, 1883) he admitted, "In our struggle to render the written language more noble, we are allowing the Greek people to become more uncouth." However, he explicitly ruled out switching to writing in demotic, which he dismissed as "the tattered Romaic language, which is not sufficient for anything" (emphasis in original). End of hopes for the resurrection of Ancient Greek By about 1880, it had become tacitly accepted that the fifty-year dream of Vyzantios, Soutsos and their fellows had failed: neither the 'common people' nor the State would ever be using Ancient Greek as their everyday language. Katharevousa thus lost one of its justifications, as a necessary halfway stage in the natural restoration of the