description of everyday life and events in quoted demotic speech and thought—looked less like an artistic choice and more like something forced on them by the deficiencies of Katharevousa. However, when it came to recommendations on what should be done about this unsatisfactory state of affairs, all Roïdis could suggest was gradual change, for which he used the "vague and unhelpful" term katharismos tis katharevousis [purification of Katharevousa]. Though almost complete by 1888, Roïdis' Idols was not finally published until 1893, well after Psycharis' My Journey, which was to transform the Language Question debate. 1888–97 Impact of Psycharis The publication in 1888 of My Journey by Ioannis Psycharis marked a complete break with the earlier style of discussion on the Language Question. Although Psycharis was a leading academic linguist, My Journey was written entirely in demotic, and strongly advocated the immediate abandonment of Katharevousa and the adoption of demotic for all written purposes. At this time Psycharis was assistant to the Professor of Greek at the École spéciale des Langues orientales in Paris, and My Journey described an 1886 visit he had made to Constantinople, Chios and Athens. The narrative was interwoven with observations on Greek language, culture and politics; this travelogue form made it easy for Psycharis to use the viewpoint of an interested outsider to observe and comment on things that seemed absurd to him, but were taken for granted by the locals. His central argument was that it is the spoken language that is the true voice of the Greek nation, and that Greece must embrace and reclaim this ancestral language. Only then will it be able to reclaim its ancestral lands. As a Neogrammarian linguist, Psycharis stressed the importance of observations of actual spoken usage, and urged his fellow scholars to "take the boatman as our teacher ..., and run and study our language at the feet of the tailor and cobbler." As a Greek patriot, he also stressed the link between the Language Question and the Eastern Question. In the very first paragraph of his introduction, he declared that: "Language and patrida [homeland] are the same thing. To fight for the homeland or for the national language is one and the same struggle." Psycharis was to spend the next few decades promoting and elaborating these principles. He also popularized the use of Roïdis' term diglossia to describe what he regarded as the unhealthy split between