"pastrami"

[Joseph McCollum]

On Mon, 28 Jun 1999 15:03:27 +0000 Jim Rader <jrader at M-W.COM> writes:
>
>All this reminds me--and takes us back to American speech--that I
>grew up in Chicago among folk of German-American and Polish-American
>ancestry and I never heard the word "kielbasa."  We always called it
>"Polish sausage."  When I was a little kid in the '50's I heard it as
>"poler sausage" and only dimly associated it with Poles.  We used to
>get it from my great uncle Sam, a butcher who must have immigrated to
>North America when he was in his '20's.  He was the only person in my
>family with a foreign accent.
>
>Jim Rader
>
I grew up near Pittsburgh, PA in the 1960's-1970's -- and I heard
"kielbasa" all the time.  There were many different spellings of the
word.  The Washington, PA Observer-Reporter had a story in the mid-1970's
on the different spellings.
The only other one I remember is "kolbassy."  Supermarkets have replaced
a lot of the neighborhood butcher shops, so I'll bet the spelling has
been standardized since then.