Word + Quiz: demotic

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Word + Quiz: demotic

: of or for the common people

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The word demotic has appeared in five articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on April 24 in “A Passion for Punctuation Meets a Love for All Things Greek” by Vivian Gornick:

Norris was about 30 when she took her first trip to Greece, came home besotted and lowered herself into the ocean of Greek studies available in New York City: “In the years that followed, I swung back and forth between modern Greek and ancient Greek, cramming modern Greek before a trip, returning to ancient Greek when I got home.” At one point she even moved to Astoria, the Greek-American neighborhood in Queens, embedding herself among living Greeks so that every waking hour away from her office she’d be surrounded by either the demotic Greek of the street or the Greek of Thucydides in her armchair.

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