Linguist and educationalist Manolis Triantafyllidis (who would later play a major role in producing demotic readers, grammars and dictionaries) argued that "children emerged from school able to say nose, ears, pig, horse and house in Ancient Greek but without having broadened their repertoire of concepts". Triantafyllidis, Delmouzos and the philosopher and educationalist Dimitris Glinos soon became the leading lights of the Association, effectively supplanting the diaspora-based group surrounding Psycharis, Eftaliotis and Pallis. Opposition to demoticism All this activity inevitably aroused vocal opposition from the Katharevousa establishment, which in 1911 led not only to the closure of the Volos school, but also to the insertion into the new constitution of a clause declaring Katharevousa to be the official language of Greece. Article 107 stated that "the official language of the State is that in which the constitution and the texts of Greek legislation are drawn up; any intervention aimed at corrupting it is forbidden". This ingenious wording managed to specify Katharevousa without needing to define it. It was during this constitutional debate that Professor , one of the loudest opponents of demotic, produced one of his characteristic denunciations: "the language of the vulgarists is unusable in both poetry and prose. Since poetry seeks out beauty, the mutilations, the vulgarities and mire of barbaric words are incapable of producing a linguistic work of art, just as one cannot build a Parthenon out of filthy materials." By contrast Georgios Hatzidakis, Professor of Linguistics at Athens University (and one of the most authoritative linguists of modern Greece), while no less opposed to demoticism, adopted a more considered approach. "Like other purists, Hatzidakis rejected the claim that there was a common spoken language, arguing that spoken Greek was fragmented into dialects and therefore unsuitable for written communication." "His chief argument against demoticism, however, was a purely conservative one ... He claimed that by his time, Katharevousa had become the written medium of communication throughout the Greek-speaking world, whereas each demoticist wrote in a different language, each of which was characterized by anomalies. After all the efforts of learned Greeks to develop the written language over the centuries, he argued, it would be absurd, if not impossible, to abandon it and start all over again." Venizelos' reforms of 1917 Against this opposition the Association made little progress until 1917. But in the intervening years Greece had greatly expanded its territory in the successful Balkan Wars, and