structures necessary to express complex meaning; but after a century of demotic prose literature, and indeed sixty years of school textbooks written in demotic, it was hard to make this seem convincing. The booklet itself came to represent what some identified as a "Katharevousa mentality", characterized by "cliches, empty rhetoric, and the pretentious display of lexical and grammatical virtuosity". Katharevousa had by now become so closely identified with the Colonels that when their unpopular regime collapsed in July 1974, support for Katharevousa and enforced diglossia crumbled with it, never to recover. The new democratic government of Konstantinos Karamanlis then set about language reform for one last time. 1976: Resolution and the end of diglossia The Greek language question was finally laid to rest on 30 April 1976, when Article 2 of Law 309—still written in Katharevousa—stipulated that Modern Greek should be the sole language of education at all levels, starting with the school year 1977–78. This Law defined Modern Greek as: ... the Demotic that has been developed into a Panhellenic instrument of expression by the Greek People and the acknowledged writers of the Nation, properly constructed, without regional and extreme forms. However this demotic was far from the "vulgar grocers' language" of two centuries before. It had absorbed elements of Katharevousa and evolved into what is now generally called Standard Modern Greek or SMG (to distinguish it from plain Modern Greek, which covers everything since the fall of Constantinople in 1453). The folksy neologisms popularized by Psycharis had been largely trimmed away again (these were the "extreme forms" deprecated in Law 309), and henceforward in SMG new words would usually be coined the Katharevousa way, using ancient models. The result has been that with SMG, "the Greeks of today have the best of both worlds, since their contemporary language offers them potentially the most expressive and productive features of both demotic and Katharevousa"; and that now "People can use this language without political implications or personal risk, and the old embarrassment stemming from uncertainty about 'correct' written usage is largely a thing of the past." Law 309 was effectively irreversible, since it would soon produce a generation who could not even read Katharevousa, let alone write or speak it, and this spelled the end for diglossia in Greece. In 1977 SMG was officially recognized as the language of administration, and over the next decade the entire legal system converted