Ahoy! ‘Tis time to talk pirate, me hearties
(CNN) – Here’s a tip, if you want to talk like a pirate, add “me hearties” to the end of any sentence.
The meaning is simple — “my friends, my mates” — as in “drink up, me hearties” or “meet at Starbucks, me hearty.”
But there are many ways beyond simple speaking to celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day.
It was an idea born in 1995 on a YMCA racquetball court in Albany, Oregon. John “Ol’ Chumbucket” Baur and his friend Mark “Cap’n Slappy” Summers began unleashing insults at one another, as pirates might. They selected September 19, simply because Summers had recently divorced, it was his ex-wife’s birthday, and he figured “the date was stuck in my head, and I wasn’t going to do anything with it anymore,” he told CNN in 2009.
But it wasn’t until humorist Dave Barry caught wind of the idea and threw his support behind it in a September 2002 Miami Herald column that this rickety ship took sail.
“As the name suggests, this is a day on which everybody would talk like a pirate. Is that a great idea, or what?” Barry wrote back then. “There are so many practical benefits that I can’t even begin to list them all.”
The endorsement launched a full-fledged movement that seems to grow each year.
Yes, you can “update your plunderin,” or manage your “grog fests” on Facebook in the ultimate test of pirate literacy. Go to settings and then language and select English (Pirate) in the drop down menu.
If you need help with your pirate lingo — and you’re too lazy to write your own tweets — Post Like a Pirate is a handy translator that can also tweet your translation. Just don’t get too complicated.
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