suo-ico-dila-ipxe-cit-si-ligar-fila-crepus

So "Mary Poppins: The Supercalifragilistic Musical" is drawing near and with all my hard core sing-a-longs during my childhood days (was and still am quite the chronic songbird..), I've pretty much memorised the whole song and saying "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" forwards takes very little effort - but now, I'm learning to say it backwards (yea, I know, I'm cool heee) and I found some pretty fun facts about the word on wikipedia!

#1 Apparently, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious DOES have a meaning!

When asked how they came up with it, Sherman and Robert, the writer and co-writer of this song commented:
"That's a word we sort of concocted from our childhood when we used to make up double talk words. In the screenplay version of Mary Poppins we wanted her to give the children a gift they could bring back with them from inside the chalk drawing when they came out into the real world. If it was a tangible thing like a seashell or pine cone it would disappear.. we wanted something super colossal and corny.. so we used the word 'super' and added 'califragilistic' which means nothing really." (ooooh, that's quite special eh!)

In the film, the little girl whom Mary Poppins takes care of describes it as "something to say when you don't know what to say". (imagine saying it in awkward situations with someone you don't have much to talk about to - I don't imagine it'll improve things very much though but hey, you never know)

And although the songwriters have not attached any meaning per se to the word, attempts have been made to define the word by analysing its individual root words:
super- "above", cali- "beauty", fragilistic- "delicate", expiali- "to atone", and docious- "educable", which all add up to mean "Atoning for educability through delicate beauty." (not bad for a word that was meant to be "super collosal and corny")

#2 With regards to some helpful hints on how to say it backwards..

In the film, Mary Poppins says the syllables backwards: "docious-ali-expi-listic-fragi-cali-repus" (except that she pronounces "repus" as "rupus" because the director thought it sounded better)

But in the stage musical, she says it with the word spelt backwards: "suo-ico-dila-ipxe-cit-si-ligar-fila-crepus" (so this is what I'm learning to say atm :P separated the syllables myself so no idea how accurate it is.. will be perking my ears to listen to what Mary Poppins will be saying during the musical, hehe!)

#3 Oh and yesterday (Sept 13th) was Roald Dahl day (he's the author of "Mary Poppins")!