concede that it was ready. This image of demotic 'still waiting for its Dante' reappeared many times in the next few decades, in the works of many other writers. It is noteworthy that none of the participants in this controversy (not even Kontos) called for the full resurrection of Ancient Greek, even as an ultimate dream. That hope now belonged to the past. From the new perspective of evolutionary linguistics, it would have seemed as unrealistic as persuading the whole of modern Italy to revert to speaking and thinking in Classical Latin. Roïdis, diglossia and The Idols Meanwhile, Roïdis had been formulating his own critique of the current state of the Greek language, from his point of view as a master of Katharevousa. Already in 1885 he had argued that it had become impossible to write without being forced to choose between words and grammatical forms that were "either exiled from our written discourse on the grounds that they are vulgar, or archaic and therefore alien to spoken usage". In 1885 he had also coined the word diglossia to describe the way members of Parliament, for example, used Katharevousa in prepared speeches but switched to demotic in debate. Roïdis pointed out that it was not simply a matter of spoken versus written forms, since both were being spoken, and on exactly the same topics; or of social class or educational level, since the same men were using both. Instead of gradually moving to a more informal style or register, as in other languages, the speakers were switching out of one language and into another, lexically and grammatically distinct, with nothing in between. In the same year he began work on a longer treatment of the language question, The Idols, which was substantially complete by 1888. The 'Idols' of the title were the beliefs of the linguistic purists: that modern spoken Greek was corrupt, poor in vocabulary, and split into dissimilar dialects. Writing in his own precise Katharevousa, Roïdis introduced a wide range of linguistic evidence and coolly demolished each in turn. He also returned to his earlier theme, that it was impossible to use Katharevousa to describe simple everyday actions and objects such as food, clothes, furniture and utensils without sounding stilted and unnatural, and that it was therefore unsuited to realistic prose about ordinary life. Viewed in this light, the technique of Papadiamantis, Vizyinos and others—placing much of the