Is “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” a real word?
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious - I’m singing this you know. Of course I am. How can you let that vocal moment slip by. And then the ones around me start to sing it also. What a fabulous song. Thanks be to Mary. No not the mother of Jesus. Mary Poppins. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. um diddle um diddle um diddle ay. um diddle um diddle um diddle ay. um diddle um diddle um diddle ay. If you say it loud enough, you’ll always sound precocious ~ Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious ~ So what’s with this word anyway. To find out more I read this fabulous article with a well researched background on its history.I hope you enjoy the read. Love Duncan. 
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/msupercali.htmlSDSTAFF Euty says:Sadly, the exact origin of the word “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” may never be pinned down, so this will be, for the time being at least, an incomplete report. But we do know this–it considerably predates the 1964 Disney movie Mary Poppins in which it was prominently featured.The word was never used in the original P. L. Travers books. The common theory is that the word was created by Richard and Robert Sherman for use in the song of the same name in Mary Poppins. This is far from the case. Our research first took us to a lawsuit that was filed after the movie came out by Life Music, Inc., against Wonderland Music, the publisher of the Mary Poppins song. It was a copyright infringement suit brought by Barney Young and Gloria Parker, who had written a song in 1949 entitled “Supercalafajaistickespeealadojus” and shown it to Disney in 1951. They asked for twelve million dollars in damages. The suit was decided in the Shermans’ favor because, among other reasons, affidavits were produced from two New Yorkers, Stanley Eichenbaum and Clara Colclaster, who claimed that “variants of the word were known to and used by them many years prior to 1949.”The decision makes for fairly humorous reading. Apparently the judge got tired of writing out the whole word, so every time it had to be mentioned it was replaced by the phrase “the word” as if it were some loathsome artifact that had to be held at arm’s length.At any rate, we now had some indication that the word had been used previously, so we attempted to follow up on the reference to Eric P. Hamp in the original question. All I could find was a quick comment in response to a query in the journal American Speech where Hamp explains that the word should be broken up into two sections : supercalifragilistic and expialidocious. Big help. But it did lead us to the original query in Volume 47 of that journal. There, folk etymologist Peter Tamony claims that “an example in print was found in a Syracuse University humor magazine of the 1930s.” He fails, however, to provide a cite.The Orange Peel was the only humor magazine we could find any reference to that was published at the time at Syracuse University. (It later merged with another magazine Argot to become The Syracusan.) So, we contacted Ed Galvin at the Syracuse University Archives. His assistant, Mary O’Brien, tells us that this is a rumor that surfaces every ten years or so. She says, “I remember searching through the “Orange Peel” in the early 1990s for any trace of ’supercalifragilisticexphilalidocious’ and the university archivist at the time, Mrs. Amy Doherty, also researched the rumor. No trace of the origin was ever found.”Heading back to square one, we went back to the Sherman brothers to see what they may have said about it. In their book Walt’s Time: From Before to Beyond, they state :When we were little boys in the mid-1930’s, we went to a summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains, where we were introduced to a very long word that had been passed down in many variations through many generations of kids. The word was first coined in 1918, and was supposed to be even bigger and harder to say than antidisestablishmentarianism. . . . The word as we first heard it was super-cadja-flawjalistic-espealedojus.
