iain mcbride

WHERE "SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIUS" CAME FROM, AND THE LAWSUIT THAT FOLLOWED The famous word in Mary Poppins (1964) was meant to be the Banks children’s secret. Instead it ended up in court, and Disney’s defence came from a college newspaper… The full story is here 👇👇 When songwriters Richard and Robert Sherman were boys at summer camp, they had a secret word the adults didn’t understand. Years later, when writing the songs for Mary Poppins, they decided Jane and Michael Banks should have one one too. The result was “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, the classic tune sung by Mary and Bert inside Bert’s chalk drawing. On screen, the word spreads exactly the way a child’s secret word should. Mary, never one to be outdone, even says it backwards. By the time the children are home, they have taught it to the maid and the cook, and the whole household is singing it enough to make Mr Banks lose his mind. The word caught on with audiences, and then it caught up with Disney. In 1949, songwriters Gloria Parker and Barney Young had released a song called “Supercalafajalistickespialadojus”. The melody and lyrics were nothing like the Shermans’, but the word was close enough. After the film came out, they sued Disney for plagiarism. Language experts have never pinned down where the word began or what it originally meant. It has even picked up a less innocent legend along the way, an urban myth that it started as slang connected to Irish or Scottish prostitutes. What is clear is that it had been around in some form long before the Shermans, or Parker and Young, got hold of it. Disney’s lawyers went looking for something older to prove Parker and Young hadn't created the word, and found it. On 10 March 1931, a Syracuse University student named Helen Herman had written in the college newspaper, the Syracuse Daily Orange, about a word she had come up with years earlier to describe anything wonderful. “I believe that I am the sole originator of it,” she wrote, spelling it “Supercaliflawjalisticexpialadoshus”. It meant, in her words, “all that is grand, great, glorious, splendid, superb, wonderful.” The case went Disney’s way. Gloria Parker and Barney Young lost, and decades on, it’s one of the few words almost everybody knows.