In a scenario familiar to those who follow debates on the Arabic language, the April 8, 2008 episode of Al-Jazeera’s “al-Ittijaah al-Mu‘aakis” pitted Dr. Ali Arsaan, the defender of Classical/Standard Arabic (Fusha) against Dr. Rafiq Ruhana, the defender of the colloquial (Ammiyya). Framed largely in military-oriented tropes, the discussion painted a picture of divisive and low-cultured dialects mobilized and on the attack against the language of unity and intellect. This ideology, which views the colloquial as a threat to the standard or classical language, and fears a public role for colloquial Arabic, has remained prevalent throughout much of the twentieth century. Yet, in late nineteenth-century Egypt, the Arab Nahda project of disseminating knowledge to ‘the masses’ gave rise to several journals that found a public role for Ammiyya, introducing it into the realm of written knowledge. The use of colloquial in the journals al-Ustaadh (1892-3), al-Arghuul (1894-5) and al-Ghazaala (1896-8) is well known, as are the arguments put forth by some in the debates from that period that it was necessary to spread education through an accessible medium. And while what some writers said about Ammiyya and Fusha made it clear that there was an uneasiness associated with this new public role for Ammiyya, a true contradiction between ideology and practice during this time of experimentation only becomes obvious through a close textual analysis of language usage in the journals. Through a framework of stylistic variation as ‘identity construction’ and the semiotic processes of iconization and erasure, this paper analyzes al-Nadim’s use of language variation in al-Ustaadh to sort out the contradiction between ideology and practice. For instance, a close analysis of al-Nadim’s use of code-mixing and style reveals a much more complex usage of the registers than the conventional reading of his work that portrays a one-to-one correspondence between language register and social class. What al-Nadim communicated through the juxtaposition of registers demonstrates how language practice contributed to the dominance by the early twentieth century of classical Arabic (Fusha) as both authentic and modern. This paper argues that even as his journal published didactic dialogues and articles in Ammiyya, al-Nadim’s language practice chipped away at the prospect of a sustained literary role for the colloquial by indexing it with the backward and superstitious realm of rural women and eventually attempting to erase the notion that an educated, modern Egyptian would have any use for the lower linguistic register.