who are "the people"?

In general what I like so much about Indo-European roots is the way they can, like poetry, illuminate a word anew for us, afresh (ahoy!*).  For example, the discovery that the word doubt has the same root as the number two has, I think, a cool effect on our understanding of what doubt is—almost makes the word itself a kind of self-contained micro-poem (like Joyce's phoenish).

So but I found the root of demos- (the people in a democracy) to be a little abstruse, connection-to-the-word-in-question–wise: frustratingly unilluminating.  What mysterious stringy neural cord (yuck!) might connect division to the people?  All I could could come up with was that the people are the building blocks of society, that we're what civilization is divisible into...or something.

Well, I mentioned the question to someone—you know, one of the people—and he said, without hesitation, "Individual."  Sure enough, individual means not [in-] divisible**—so, yeah, basically a person is the place where you can divide no further: the divvying-up stops here.  And that does add a little kind of poetic justification to the notion of democracy, somehow, doesn't it?

* Pardon me.

** The American Heritage Dictionary's Indo–European appendix has really let me down, here, though:  I just can't seem to trace divide any further back than the Latin videre (to separate) [not to mention the problem that we seem to have a double-negative kind of a problem on our hands, because isn't the di- in divide a negative?—in which case indivisible would mean not not separable?  I hope I'm wrong because, if not, this is most non-, non-non-, non-heinous!].  This person (along with others I found on Google) identifies a root weidh- (maybe widh-), which he or she very interestingly connects to a Sanskrit word meaning lonely or solitary, a Greek word meaning unmarried man, a Latin word meaning bereft or void, and our own widow, but which I just can't find in the damned AHD!  (Maybe this?)  I guess it really is true: life is pain.