Dociousaliexpilisticfragicalirepus

So, Mary Poppins fans across the country are all up in arms about this report on ABC News the other night. They claim that Mary is lying when she tells Bert she can say Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious backwards. First of all, why the heck did this make it onto the news? Second of all, duh! I've known it was wrong basically my entire life, but never actually bothered to get into it because it really doesn't matter. But now they've made it an issue.

The real problem is not that she doesn't really say it backwards, but that she is inconsistent in her delivery. For most of it, she's just saying pieces of the word forward by letter but in backward order until she gets to the "repus" part when she suddenly puts the letters backward. The thing is, if she would have said the entire word backward, letter by letter, it would have sounded ridiculous. Like this kid.

Meanwhile, are we all just going to ignore the fact that Mary Poppins itself is basically one huge lie? Pretty much everything that happens in that movie is completely impossible; Mary flies around, jumps into a chalk pavement picture, tidies up rooms with a snap of her fingers, etc ... In light of all that, can't we just let this Supercal thing slide?

This does become an issue when Julie Andrews herself runs around at her one of her public appearances, and fulfills a request from one of the innocent children in the audience to say Supercal backwards. Now she's lying as a real person, in real life, to real children sitting in the audience blindly believing her. That is the real outrage.