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. What supercalifragilisticexpialidocious really means: In studying this word, we …

Comment posted on Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious by hs4mm

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What supercalifragilisticexpialidocious really means:

In studying this word, we must maintain the following context: The ancient Greeks were individualistic and proud people — the idea of feeling guilt for being good would never have occurred to them — the mere thought of atoning for beauty would be anathema to them — they would exalt in being good.

To recap Marina’s identification of the various parts of the word: super{ extreme }-cali{ beauty }-fragilistic{ delicate }-expiali{ to satisfy }-docious{ educable }.

Now the parts need to be combined as per the rules of English morphology. But as per English Morphology, the morpheme -istic is a suffix, and the morpheme ex- is typically a prefix; so we actually have two words: supercalifragilistic and expialidocious. The first means a person of extreme, delicate beauty; and the second means to successfully teach an educable person.

But the concept of a person who can successfully teach an educable person is rather useless — after all, the success of the teaching is more or less guaranteed by the student being educable!

In contrast, the concept of a person who has not just the ability to teach educable ones but the ability to induce a love of learning — the concept of a person who can induce a thirst for knowledge and quench that thirst — is useful.

To convey this new concept, we need to reverse the order of the two parts of the word, thus: docious-expiali. Although English Morphology does not allow us to form a such a word, it allows us to use expiali-docious as a terminator of a word with the order of the thoughts reversed when the preceding letter is a ’s’ — a mnemonic for this rule is the letter ’s’ thought of as being a left arrow on top of a right arrow thereby signifying a “change in the order of the thoughts that follow”.