Post by n***@gmail.comPuzzi is a form of puzzo: stink or foul smell
I can only imagine they were going for the ‘eating garbage’ angle when he said it. Not the best choice of words, but again Tony and his crew messed up words and phases constantly.
The Italian immigrants who landed in NY and NJ say Pootsie for shit. So Paulie was saying they ate shit before the Italians came along. This I am sure of as it's my family's word. When I heard Paulie say it, I laughed out loud. For the longest time, I thought it was my family's secret word. HAHAHA
There is another source / meaning for Pootsie. It is one of those little naked cherub angels in Italian paintings. My family was from Tuscany so the dialect was different, but Pootsie basically meant a fat little child. In NJ, most of the Italians were from a little farther south, so the same word could have had the meaning of garbage or sh*t, but it would appear that there are two different words which ended up pronounced more or less the same, puzzo for foul smell and putto for cherub. The plural of putto is putti, which in the Tuscony dialect of the early 1900s would be pronounced pootsie.