I infer this meaning from the word „ρίνας“: a heroin addict. Someone who sniffs smack through the nose (V. Kapetanaki, The Dictionary of the Street, 1951)
We find it in the lyrics of the song by Kaldaras, adapted by Nikolaidis as “The World Has Changed”, on Nikolaidis’s album Rebetiko Moments—Tough Guy Songs (1983):
Our aristocrats have taken to the streets,
because they too fancy the life of a rebetis, everything grows old in life, except that one thing,
ah, the bohemian life never fades,
everything grows old in life, except that one thing,
ah, the bohemian life never fades.
A 1964 composition, with Moscholiou on the original recording:
Ah, bravo! You experts should do something to enrich the collection, so the rest of us have something to learn from too!
ZARAZ
(Κουνάβης Ευώδιος, ποιητής (εκ του προχείρου και εν πλήρει φορμαλισμώ))
7
Folk etymology must have played some part here. Surely the average streetwise bloke wouldn’t have understood the rhis of rhinos, the rhina, but once rhina reached his ears in a nasal-drug context, it would have fitted perfectly as slang or code for “heroin”, or more specifically, “heroin taken through the nose”.
Perhaps the original lyrics must be more widely known.
I didn’t expect this “altered” version of them to be so moving.
But, as they say, tastes differ, and so on.
ZARAZ
(Κουνάβης Ευώδιος, ποιητής (εκ του προχείρου και εν πλήρει φορμαλισμώ))
9
Thinking about it, couldn’t it be “rini” (how do you say “ashtray”—“taso”?) and Kapetanakis have indulged in folk etymology? How did the third-declension form end up as “rini” rather than “rina”? (ρήνη, τασάκι, τάσο, παρετυμολόγησε, τριτόκλιτο, ρίνη, ρίνα)
I don’t think the lexicographer’s reference to ρίνα (nose) necessarily means that this is how the streetwise speaker himself thought of it. It probably derives from heroin > ρίνη, unrelated to ρίνα and with an entirely coincidental similarity.
On the other hand, in parodies of streetwise speech, such as those by Tsiforos, we occasionally see expressions in Katharevousa too, usually in corrupted form. Depending on how faithful the parodies are, perhaps the colloquial forms were not entirely untouched by Katharevousa after all, even if (naturally) their speakers did not know it well.
My interactions with common people of an older generation (such as my father and uncle, who were butchers at the market all their lives) also demonstrate this.
But you can also see the mixed language in Markos’s Autobiography, as well as in his recorded interviews that have come down to us.
Well, I’m not exactly thrilled… however, the fact that Kapetanakis records the lemma in late 1950 doesn’t strike me as a fabrication.
ZARAZ
(Κουνάβης Ευώδιος, ποιητής (εκ του προχείρου και εν πλήρει φορμαλισμώ))
14
The difficulty, I think, is getting “rina” to become “rini” without “heroin”, but “heroin” doesn’t need “rina”, although it could be helped by Rini and aspirin.
