“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” (in English Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious) is an invented word of 33 letters, famous for being the protagonist of the most iconic song – written by the Sherman brothers – from the 1964 Disney film Mary Poppins. The term, apparently meaningless, is actually synonymous with something wonderful, surprising, extraordinary – just like the magical world created by Walt Disney.
The word can be broken down into several elements, each with a small fragment of meaning: super (“above”), cali (“beauty”), fragilistic (“delicate”), expiali (“to make amends”) and docious (“instructable”). Putting these parts together, you get something like: “making amends for the possibility of teaching through delicate beauty” – a definition as bizarre as it is poetic, perfectly in line with the magical and surreal spirit of Mary Poppins.
Walt Disney’s film was released in 1965, won five Oscars, generating enormous success and marking subsequent generations of spectators with timeless songs such as A little sugar (A spoonful of sugar), Cam-Camin (Chim Chim Cher-ee) and, of course, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious“). The magical nanny born from the book of the same name by PL Travers she is an exceptional woman dealing with the children of the bourgeois Banks family, against the backdrop of twentieth-century London, who fascinated the public with her strict rules but dictated by the goodness of a heart of gold and enchanted them with melodies so catchy that they are still remembered today.
The ingenuity of the Sherman brothers is found not only in the film’s melodies, but also in the strategy of using a completely invented and surreal word, which has today become the very symbol of Mary Poppins and is embedded in memory and cinematic history. In the Italian version, rather than a loss of meaning, we can talk about creative transposition: the translation managed to maintain both the assonance and the playful tone of the original. The word remains one uniquea perfect example of pun And compound word at the same time.
The language game it often arises from sounds, unusual combinations or new meanings, and serves to surprise, entertain and stimulate the imagination. It’s an example of linguistic productivity morphosyntactic, that is, the natural ability of speakers of a language to create new terms and, in the case of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, this creativity becomes musical.
