April 2, 2012 at 8:00 pm

Picture of the Day: Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

by twistedsifter

 

SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS

 

supercalifragilisticexpialidocious graffiti street art toronto Picture of the Day: Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

Photograph by Pixel9ine/Andre B

 

How awesome is this graffiti piece? This was posted back in 2007 to a forum/messageboard called Photography-on-the.net by user Pixel9ine, and it resurfaced today on Reddit. The piece is actually located in the Sifter’s hometown of Toronto, Canada!

This was taken from the Bloor Street viaduct looking down onto the Don Valley Parkway. Unfortunately the piece has since been scrawled over and no longer exists. Thanksfully, Pixel9ine was able to immortalize this piece for the Internet to appreciate 🙂

“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” is a song from the 1964 Disney musical film Mary Poppins. The song was written by the Sherman Brothers, and sung by Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. It also appears in the stage show version. Since Mary Poppins was a period piece set in 1910, period-sounding songs were wanted. “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” sounds like contemporary music hall songs “Boiled Beef and Carrots” and “Any Old Iron”.

According to Richard M. Sherman, co-writer of the song with his brother, Robert, the word was created by them in two weeks, mostly out of double-talk. The roots of the word have been defined as follows: super- “above”, cali- “beauty”, fragilistic- “delicate”, expiali- “to atone”, and docious- “educable”, with the sum of these parts signifying roughly “Atoning for educability through delicate beauty.” [Source: Wikipedia]