Pirates are Divine
International Talk Like a Pirate Day
International Talk Like a Pirate Day (ITLAPD) is a parody of traditional holiday seasons invented in 1995 by John Baur (Ol' Chumbucket) and Mark Summers (Cap'n Slappy), of Portland, Oregon. The duo proclaimed that henceforth September 19 would be an annual celebration when every person in the world should talk like a pirate. As an example, one who participates in the festivities of the day would greet a friend “Ahoy, me hearty!’ instead of ‘hello’ or ‘hi’. The inspiration for the holiday is the magic and romance of the Golden Age of Piracy.
Mark Summers says International Talk Like a Pirate Day is the only holiday based on a sports injury. Summers stated that during a racquetball game with Baur, one of them got hurt and called out with the call of pain: "Aaarrr!"! And so the birth of ITLAPD came to be. The racquet game was played on June 6, 1995. But because that date is reserved out of respect for D-Day, the pair picked Summers' ex-wife's birthday; he thought: now that I can remember.
What started as a laugh between two friends received international attention when John Baur and Mark Summers wrote a letter about their invented holiday to the American syndicated humor columnist Dave Barry in 2002. Barry was amused by the prank and promoted the day in his column. It was Dave Barry’s introduction to the world of this great holiday created by Baur and Summers. The holiday is now celebrated internationally, and Baur and Summers are indeed profiting from the sale of their books and T-shirts on their website related to the ITLAPD theme. The global success of the holiday is thought to be the result of the liberation of the idea of trade marking, and therefore the holiday spawns creativity and "viral" growth.
ITLAPD creators, Baur and Summers, found themselves under the hot lights of TV filming in the 2006 season premiere episode of ABC's Wife Swap which premiered on September 18, 2006. They appeared in the show as "a family of pirates" along with Baur’s wife, Tori. On June 26, 2008 Baur also appeared on the June 26, 2008 episode of Jeopardy! where he was introduced as a "writer and pirate."
The patron saint of Talk Like a Pirate Day is actor Robert Newton, who played the character of Long John Silver in the 1950 Disney film Treasure Island and then in the 1954 film Long John Silver. Newton used his West country accent in his versions of Long John Silver and Blackbeard; today we still call it the ‘pirate accent’.
In Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island (1883), he painted pirates with peg legs, parrots, and treasure maps and the book was a huge success and it greatly influenced the pirate parody culture.
Pirate sayings
Seamen in the days of yore spoke their own language full of colloquialisms, words and phrases that were virtually unintelligible to a land-legger. What would you make of the pirate parlance in this paragraph from Richard Henry Dana, Jr. in the Seaman’s Manual (1844):
Lift the skin up, and put into the bunt the slack of the clews (not too taut), the leech and foot-rope, and body of the sail; being careful not to let it get forward under or hang down abaft. Then haul your bunt well up on the yard, smoothing the skin and bringing it down well abaft, and make fast the bunt gasket round the mast, and the jigger, if there be one, to the tie.
How about these 17th century explanations about seamanship from pirate Sir Henry Mainwaring:
If the ship go before the wind, or as they term it, betwixt two sheets, then he who conds uses these terms to him at the helm: Starboard, larboard, the helm amidships... If the ship go by a wind, or a quarter winds, they say aloof, or keep your loof, or fall not off, wear no more, keep her to, touch the wind, have a care of the lee-latch. all these do imply the same in a manner, are to bid him at the helm to keep her near the wind.
Lt. Robert Maynard on Blackbeard at the Battle of Ocracoke:
He styl'd us 'young puppies' and shouted 'May the Devil take my soul if I ever gives quarter or asks it of ye!'
"Damn ye, yellow-bellied sapsuckers, I'm a better man than all of ye milksops put together."
The only written records recovered from the Adventure after Blackbeard's death ran as follows:
Such a day, rum all out- Our company somewhat sober- A damned confusion amongst us !- Rogues a-plotting - Great talk of separation- so I looked sharp for a prize- Such a day found one with a great deal of liquor on board, so kept the company hot, damned hot, then things went well again.
Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson who wrote Treasure Island was a master of the pirate tongue. Here are a few quoted from his novel:
• "Bring me one noggin of rum, now, won't you, matey."
• "Avast, there!"
• "Dead men don't bite."
• "Shiver my timbers!" (often pronounced as "Shiver me timbers!")
• "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest -- Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"
• "There! That's what I think of ye. Before an hour's out, I'll stove in your old block house like a rum puncheon. Laugh, by thunder, laugh! Before an hour's out, ye'll laugh upon the other side. Them that die'll be the lucky ones."
• "Have I lived this many years, and a son of a rum puncheon cock his hat athwart my hawse at the latter end of it?"
The characteristic pirate grunt "Arrr!" (or "Rrrr!" or "Yarrr!") came from the 1950 classic Disney film Treasure Island, says researcher Mark Liberman. Or it may be that Liberman’s research will show that grunting has been a trait of human kind since the first cave people. In any case, here are some classics:
Peter Pan
Peter Pan’s Captain Hook (1911), is full of pirate diction:
"Avast belay, yo ho, heave to,
A-pirating we go
And if we're parted by a shot
We're sure to meet below!"
"Yo ho, yo ho, the pirate life,
The flag o'skull and bones
A merry hour, a hempen rope
And 'hey' for Davy Jones!"
