Rebus Life

As I’ve noted here before, I enjoy the NY Time’s crossword.  My favorite day – by far – is Thursday, which can be challenging because of the different types of themes it may contain.  A few weeks ago, the Thursday puzzle was rebus.  This means that some answers have more than one letter in a box.  The example below is one such puzzle.  The theme of this puzzle was Mary Poppins and the rebus answer was Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, which made me think of my favorite non-words used in songs.  In order, with a brief explanation, they are:

1.       mama-say-mama-sa-mama-coosa: Michael Jackson, Wanna  be Startin’ Something:  generally accepted etymology was that Jacko lifted the phrase from Manu Dibango’s Soul Makossa (the two settled copyright charges out of court) and the word Makossa means dance in Doulala.

2.       Koo-koo-ka-choo: Simon and Garfunkel, Mrs Robinson: Appears to be closely associated and possibly derived from goo goo g’job used by The Beatles in I am the Walrus.  There are two definitions. The first is that it is up to reader to interpret what it means given the context.  The second is a slang way everything is fine.

3.       Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, Robert and Richard Sherman, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious: The roots of the word have been defined as follows: super- "above", cali- "beauty", fragilistic- "delicate", expiali- "to atone", and -docious "educable" – The word was added to the OED in 1986.

Flumadiddle

utter nonsense