Root of the Week: Demos

Root of the Week

DEMOS Greek

The Greek word demos means “the people,” ”the common people,” or “the populace.”

MONDAY  Demotic (Noun)

Demotic means “used by or typical of the common people.” Demotic is most often used of language.  Demotic language is the form of a language—colloquial language—spoken by the common people. The version of Greek spoken by people in Greece today is Modern Standard Greek, but is also called demotic Greek to distinguish it from ancient Greek.

In ancient Egypt, a cursive form of hieroglyphic writing was used from its development in the third millennium BCE. Then, in the mid-first millennium BCE, another form of Egyptian arose, referred to by Egyptians as “document writing script.” The ancient Greek historian Herodotus called this form demotic to distinguish from the hieratic and hieroglyphic scripts that preceded it, and the term Demotic Egyptian is used in the same way today. It is the convention to capitalize the ”D” in Demotic Egyptian but not in demotic Greek.

TUESDAY  Democracy (Noun), Democratic (Adjective), Democrat (Noun)

The ancient Greeks not only gave us the word demos but also the word democracy, which combines the root demos (the people) with -cracy (from the Greek kratos), meaning “rule.”

Democracy, or “rule by the people,” was born in ancient Athens, where citizens could attend legislative assemblies and vote.  It is a bit of a stretch, however, to call ancient Athenian society democratic: “the people” did not include women or slaves. In so-called democracies for millennia afterwards, “the people” were actually “some people.” In the early United States, women and slaves couldn’t vote any more than women or slaves could in ancient Athens. Eventually, slavery was abolished, but the right of Black Americans to vote was long curtailed.   American women only gained the vote in 1920. But Americans weren’t the last to extend the franchise to women. In Switzerland, women only gained voting rights in 1971, in Portugal in 1976, and in Saudi Arabia not until 2011. 

A person who believes in democracy—the social and political equality of the people—is, by definition, a democrat. In the United States, democrats can also be Democrats—members of the Democratic party. When you see the party referred to as the Democrat party (substituting the noun democrat for the adjective democratic), you are seeing an intended slur. Since the adjective democratic is associated with what are usually seen as laudable values, those hostile to the Democratic party don’t like to use that descriptor.

WEDNESDAY  Demography (Noun), Demographer (Noun), Demographic (Adjective), Demographics (Noun)

Demography (from demos+ graphy, meaning writing) is the statistical study of human populations. Demographers study the size, density, structure, and characteristics of populations, and the demographic information they collect and analyze is used by governments, advertisers, public health experts, and many others. Demographics, a noun, is used as a short-hand way to refer to demographic information.  You might, for example, hear that a politician has a poor chance of being elected in a given district, due to its demographics (meaning that the type of people who dominate in the district are unlikely to support the politician’s platform). And an advertisement might be aimed at a particular demographic, say young people aged 14 to 25.

THURSDAY  Demagogue (Noun), Demagoguery (Noun), Demogogic (Adjective)

The term demagogue (from demos, meaning “people,” and -agogos, “leading”) was first used in ancient Greece, without any pejorative tinge, to refer to a leader of the common people. Now, however, demagogue has come to be pretty much a synonym for “scoundrel.”  A demagogue is a leader who purports to represent “the people” and seeks to whip up fanatical support through fearmongering, flattery, incendiary emotional appeals, the scapegoating of “others,” and any other means to disable critical thinking.

The tactics used by a demagogue are referred to as demagoguery and the demagogue’s  rhetoric is demagogic.  Demagoguery and demagogic rhetoric in all periods of history have shared common elements, especially extreme oversimplification.  People “like us” are “the best,” those we disagree with are “the worst,” “vermin,” a plague that must be eradicated by any means necessary.

If the ideal of democracy requires equal, informed, independent-minded citizens who weigh subjects carefully before determining what course a government or country should take, demagoguery fosters the very opposite.

FRIDAY Endemic (Adjective), Epidemiology (Noun), Epidemic (Noun), Pandemic (Noun)

Something is said to be endemic if it is native to a particular region or originates among a particular people. Plants and animals can be endemic to a region. In epidemiology (the study of diseases affecting a whole people), a disease is called endemic if it arises within a specific population. 

If that endemic disease starts to spread rapidly beyond its original locale, it is an epidemic (from epi, meaning “among,” “upon,” + demos). And when the disease rates skyrocket and people fall ill from it on a global scale, it becomes a pandemic (from pan, meaning "all" + demos). Humans have suffered pandemics periodically throughout history.  In the fourteenth century, The Black Death, a plague transmitted to humans by infected fleas, killed some 25 million people across Europe. In the fifteenth century, small pox and other European diseases carried to the Americas by European explorers killed off some 90 percent of the indigenous population.  Over 50 million deaths are attributed to The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 to 1920, and of course, the Coronavirus pandemic emerged in Wuhan, China in 2019 and quickly spread worldwide. Before 2019, the word pandemic wasn’t top of mind for most of us, but now we live with a new sense of our vulnerability to pathogens.