Simply put, it's a day for you to talk like a pirate!
If you and your friends tend to randomly try out different accents for fun, this holiday is just like that. It all started with friends talking like pirates for fun, and they ended up doing it the whole day.
International Talk Like a Pirate Day is arguably one of the Internet’s favorite holidays. It may be a surprise to some, though, that this parody celebration is older than social media—older even than Friendster or MySpace.
In June 1995 friends Mark Summers and John Baur were playing a game of racquetball when they randomly started chiding each other in “pirate slang”. The pair decided they would spend an entire day talking “like pirates” for fun.
The date of the annual celebration—September 19—is fairly arbitrary. It is the date of Summers’s ex-wife’s birthday, selected because it didn’t coincide with any other observances and because it would be easy for him to remember. The holiday was mostly celebrated among friends for several years until it was popularized by syndicated humor columnist Dave Barry in 2002. -- Britannica
EASY!
All you have to do is start putting some pirate slang into your everyday jargon. Need help to do that? Check out this pirate dictionary or even this pirate translator!
Not in the mood for talking like a pirate? Or do you want to enhance your pirating experience?
Have a go at some of these activities:
It’s clear our much-loved “pirate-ese” language bears little relation to the actual speech of 17th and 18th-century buccaneers. In fact, evidence suggests that our modern impression of pirate speech is all down to Disney. Here’s why:
Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure novel Treasure Island was published in 1883. In 1950, the popular tale was adapted for Hollywood in what was Walt Disney’s first movie made with live actors only.
Newton based his pirate talk on his own native British West Country dialect. His accent might not have been far off—the southwest of England has long been associated with pirates because of its strong maritime heritage; notorious pirate Blackbeard was even said to have come from Bristol, in the heart of that area.
Newton’s iconic role as Long John Silver was so influential that a variation of his West Country English became the standard for portrayals of pirates on stage and in the cinema. As historian Colin Woodard told National Geographic in 2011, “Newton’s performance—full of ‘arrs,’ ‘shiver me timbers,’ and references to landlubbers—not only stole the show, it permanently shaped pop culture’s vision of how pirates looked, acted, and spoke.” -- Time
For more information like above, check out the Royal Museums of Greenwich and History Hit
