Stravaging

I could not begin to tell you just how many times I have watched Mary Poppins.  It's definitely in the hundreds.  Probably pretty high in the hundreds.

After our money field trip yesterday, we sat down to watch Mary Poppins yet again, specifically to see the scene in the bank where the directors sing Fidelity Fiduciary Bank.  You know the song...

If you invest your tuppence
Wisely in the bank
Safe and sound
Soon that tuppence,
Safely invested in the bank,
Will compound

And you'll achieve that sense of conquest
As your affluence expands
In the hands of the directors
Who invest as propriety demands

So we're going along, watching the movie, and Mary Poppins has Jane and Michael heading out to run some errands.  Mary Poppins tells Michael to hurry it up.


I've seen this scene hundreds of times.  For some reason, though, as she told Michael to stop stravaging, it hit me that I had never heard that word before.  I clearly knew what it meant.  But I had never actually heard it.

So I looked it up.  Stravage.  Or stravaig.  It's Scottish.  And it means what I had always "heard" in my head.  Michael is roaming, dilly-dallying, wandering.  


What a cool word!

Of course, apparently, Ms. Poppins mispronounced it.  She says something like "straw vej ing," but according to Merriam Webster, the root word is "straw vague."  (To use something resembling real words here.)

I just found it interesting that I never heard the word before.