MUCH ADO

In the Letters of April 6, correspondent Harry Drasin showed that he knows bupkis about how that word is pronounced--and how it should be spelled phonetically--and he hasn’t much knowledge about drinks that go with pastrami sandwiches either (“Let’s Really Do Lunch,” by Ajay Sahgal, Feb. 9).

My parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland whose first home in the United States was on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I grew up listening to all of them speak Yiddish, and I never heard any of them pronounce bupkis with a middle “b,” not unless he or she had a bad cold or was otherwise vocally impaired.

And their first choice for a beverage to drink with pastrami was seltzer from a shpritz bottle. Second in popularity was Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray (celery) tonic. Dr. Brown’s cream soda, Drasin to the contrary, was No. 3.

Irv Elman

Pacific Palisades

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Editor’s Note: According to “The Joys of Yiddish,” by Leo Rosten, the word is spelled either “bubkis,” as Drasin had it, or “bopkes.” Many users of the word, however, pronounce it the way reader Elman spells it.