Thursday, July 21, 2011

Question 719: What do you have to say?


above
beauty
delicate
to atone
educable



What single term can you connect this to?



ANSWER:

SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS - Used in Mary Poppins (1964)









According to Richard M. Sherman, co-writer of the song with his brother, Robert, the word was created by them in two weeks, mostly out of double-talk.

The roots of the word have been defined as follows: super- "above", cali- "beauty", fragilistic- "delicate", expiali- "to atone", and docious- "educable", with the sum of these parts signifying roughly "Atoning for educability through delicate beauty." Although the word contains recognizable English morphemes, it does not follow the rules of English morphology as a whole. The morpheme -istic is a suffix in English, whereas the morpheme ex- is typically a prefix; so following normal English morphological rules, it would represent two words:supercalifragilistic and expialidocious. The pronunciation also leans towards it being two words since, the letter c doesn't normally sound like a k when followed by an e, an i or a y.

According to the film, it is defined as "something to say when you have nothing to say".

5 comments:

Anirban said...

Identified Mary Poppins.. the word is too tough to remember..
'Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious'

R said...

Mary Poppins
Supercalifragilisticexpialidcious
Good one

Anonymous said...

Mary Poppins song
and the meanings of the word :
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
googled for the word part of it , obviously.
Sukanto

VK said...

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

Pi.R.Square said...

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
thats mary poppins
sang the song