Next Tuesday, Sept. 19, is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and landlubbers and scallywags amongst ye will be glad I’m not on the air then. I talks like a salty dog all day I does.
Talk Like a Pirate Day was created by John Baur and Mark Summers, then of Albany, Oregon, who were playing racquetball when one of them went down and shouted, “Arrr!” and the holiday idea sprang into their minds. Dave Barry, the syndicated humor columnist, publicized their solemn observance in 2002, and soon timbers shivered across the country.
Some scurvy dogs and bilge-suckers have wondered in recent years: how authentic is this picturesque rendition of pirate speech?
“It’s far from authentic,” Molly Babel, Associate Professor of Arts and Linguistics at the University of British Columbia told us. “But there are some linguistic points that carry through.”
Professor Babel told us many original pirates were recruited from southwest England, where “arrr!” was a kind of expression like the “eh?” of Canadians. As pirates joined from all over the sea-faring world, Maritime Pidgin English, derived from the West Country, became a kind of common language for what she calls, “cross-language pirate contact.”
That’s a scholarly phrase for pillaging and plundering.
Professor Babel says much of our idea of how pirates spoke traces back to the 1950 RKO-British Disney film of Treasure Island. Robert Newton, a British actor from the West Country, played Long John Silver, with his finest theatrical West Country accent. Other on-set pirates, many also from southwest England, joined in. Robert Newton would go on to play Long John Silver in other films, as well as Bluebeard and other pirates. He often sported a rummy-twinkle in his eye, and parrot on his shoulder.
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