λαγωνικό: a police officer from the Narcotics Squad
It appears in Chrysafakis’s song “Off to the Leek” (1934)
And if anyone should suss us out
we’ll give him his cut, no doubt
so he won’t go and grass us up
and hand us over to the cops
There is one recorded instance. Were there others? How certain can we be that the expression had already acquired this meaning (throughout Greece!) and wasn’t (for example) a fleeting inspiration of the lyricist?
Even if it is a hapax legomenon in a rebetiko song, it should be given its own dictionary entry. Self-evident…
Besides, it has been properly recorded in dictionaries, so it must have been used throughout Greece…
Eleftheroudakis (1934) doesn’t have it (of course, I checked before writing).
Narcotics?
From some point onwards—certainly before my generation—the word lagoniko for police officers investigating something (not necessarily drugs) became so common that I knew it from children’s comics and the like.
I don’t know whether it’s worth including. Whose question would it answer? It’s a common word, and it’s in the dictionary.
Unless we’re interested in the information that, in the ’30s, they used it specifically for officers from the Enforcement (Narcotics?) Division, and this can be documented.
Not the Narcotics Squad specifically, but the squad dealing with crime in general. Back then, the Δίωξη was called Καταδίωξη.
And yes, I rather think that it is both relevant and supported by contemporary evidence: we can see that in the rebetiko song we’re discussing, «Διώξεως» has dropped out, leaving only the sleuths to go on point …
«In any case, the case will be cleared up through the perpetrators’ testimony, as the sleuths of the Καταδίωξη are on their trail» (ΣΦΑΙΡΑ 22/3/1916)
«All the sleuths of the Καταδίωξη began searching for the woman» (ΑΜΥΝΑ 2/7/1920)
«[…] he entrusted the case to the best sleuths of the Καταδίωξη» (ΠΡΩΙΑ 5/8/1932)
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