Nanny meets fascism
In 1964, Walt Disney released Mary Poppins starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, the man with the worst Cockney accent ever to be recorded for release on celluloid.
One of the film’s biggest song and dance tunes was a catchy little number sung by the two stars and entitled “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious“.
According to the song’s Wikipedia page, songwriters the Sherman Brothers have given several conflicting explanations for the word’s origin, in one instance claiming to have coined it themselves, based on their memories of having created double-talk words as children. At another time they are on record as having written the following:
When we were little boys in the mid-1930s, we went to a summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains, where we were introduced to a very long word that had been passed down in many variations through many generations of kids. … The word as we first hear it was super-cadja-flawjalistic-espealedojus.
Scroll forward sixty-one years from Mary Poppins on the silver screen and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious has become part of the English language.
Furthermore, as my social media timeline this week has revealed, the word itself has been parodied and used as a pun in connection with one person in particular, the disgraced 47th and 45th president of the United States, insurrectionist, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual predator, business fraudster, congenital liar and golf cheat commonly known as Donald John Trump, who is currently dealing enthusiastically and vindictively with punishing political opponents, as well as dismantling the federal government as part of his mission to Make America Grate Again (or something like that. Ed.)
