Whimsical Wednesday ~ Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

♪♪♪ Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious ♪♪♪

Click here to hear the song and see part of the movie

In the Disney movie Mary Poppins, also in the stage show version, this was one particular song sung by Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke and written by Richard and Robert Sherman. This word has always taken my fancy and I always wondered how it came about. Besides the fact that I always loved musicals, this particular film has been one of my favourites ever since it came out in 1964.

I have been reading about the roots of this word which when broken down into segments is explained as...super meaning above, cali meaning beauty, fragilistic is delicate and docious as educable. Now according to the movie when all these parts are put together they mean "Something to say when you have nothing to say". This is exactly what Mr Banks says when he is confronted by his employer who has just fired him. So Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious! ♪♪♪

A year later this song was the subject of a lawsuit by songwriters Gloria Parker and Barney Young against Wonderland Music who were the publishers of the song from the Disney film. They alleged that it was an infringement of their own 1951 song entitled "Supercalafajalistickespeealadojus" also known as "The Super Song". The Disney publishers won the lawsuit partially because affidavits were produced showing that "variants of the word were known ... many years prior to 1949".

According to a search I made this 34 letter word is NOT the longest word recorded...there is one with 189,819 letters...it is the Chemical name of titin, the largest known protein BUT it is NOT in the dictionary so NOT really a word at all!

How Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!