Is this word an example of agglutination or compounding? [closed]

Solution 1:

No, it's not an example of agglutination. It certainly consists of units glued together (and, when Mary Poppins "says it backwards," she does by deconstructing it into those components and reversing their order rather than their spellings), but the units themselves don't convey meaning.

In fairness, I just had to look up agglutination, but it requires that the component morphemes "each correspond to a single syntactic feature."

To set straight the historic record on this word, see this M-W article. The word never appeared in P.L. Travers' books, but its story didn't start with the Disney movie either. It's intriguing that Helen Herman, in her 1931 column, ascribes an overall gestalt to the word, and suggests imaginatively that it includes "all words in the category of something wonderful." From the Sherman brothers' account, it would appear that it is not Herman's invention either; they claimed to have picked it up at summer camp in the 1930s as children.

However, it appears impossible to explain all of the component morphemes in the word and their semiotic or syntactic purposes. "Super-" is easy enough, and single-handedly provides most of the positive or superlative associations. But many of the iterations of this word have included what might seem to be fragments with negative connotations, such as "fragile" or "flaw."

At the end of the day, it's a nonsense word, with origins lost in the mists of colloquial usage. It's a macguffin of a word, a word constructed solely to mean itself, to be its own example of its own phenomenon. As such, it's a great example of human creativity (or perversity?), but not of normal linguistic processes.