The Apology of Socrates is one of the most famous works of literature from classical Greece. Socrates stands accused of two charges: impiety and corrupting the youth. The arguments of his accusers are lost to history, but the Apology recounts Socrates’s defense against them. Translating literature across languages is always a dicey affair, and crossing millennia makes it all the more fraught. But in the Apology translators face a less obvious problem: stigmatization of terms by their association with certain dialects.

Socrates calls on his dimótis (δημότης) Crito and some others to serve as character witnesses, and this term is a problem for translators. No-one translates it right. They either use a circumlocution like “man of the same district as myself”, something awkward like “fellow-burgher”, or invent the word “demesman” to create a term in English just to translate dimótis into. Well, respectable English, that is. Because English already has a word for dimótis. The problem is no-one in the rarefied high halls of the ivory tower would ever use it because it’s associated with stigmatized dialects and thereby become stigmatized itself.

Crito was Socrates’s homie.