supercalif... redux

[Ben Zimmer]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 5:24 PM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
>
> On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 12:12 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> >
> > Wow! Words can be long!
> >
> > http://news.yahoo.com/who-knew/longest-word-which-is-biggest-in-english-language-28639707.html
>
> Well, to begin with the first bit of misinformation in the video, the
> Shermans never claimed to have coined
> "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" -- they said they heard a version
> of it at summer camp in the 1930s and pegged the coinage at 1918. The
> Straight Dope has a decent roundup of current knowledge about the term
> (a 2002 article, shared on ADS-L in 2004):
>
> http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/msupercali.html
>
> OED2's earliest cite is from 1949, in the song title
> "Supercalafajalistickespialadojus." As discussed in the Straight Dope
> article, the songwriters sued Disney for copyright infringement. Peter
> Tamony said in his 1972 AmSp squib "More on
> Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" that in response to the suit
> Disney uncovered a use of the word in "a Syracuse University humor
> magazine of the 1930s." No one's ever tracked down the magazine, it
> seems, but perhaps one of our word sleuths can find an antedating
> there or in another source.

My latest Boston Globe column digs more deeply into the history of the word:

http://b.globe.com/supercali

It turns out that the elusive Syracuse cite was from the student
newspaper, the Daily Orange, not from a humor magazine. A clipping of
the 1931 article was in the Merriam-Webster archives, and the folks in
Springfield graciously shared it with me:

http://cache.boston.com/multimedia/2012/04/ideas/supercalif.pdf

I'll have more on this in my Word Routes column on
VisualThesaurus.com/Vocabulary.com tomorrow.

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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