Arrr!!! Performing Piracy and the Origin of International Talk Like a Pirate Day

September 19th is a special holiday set aside every year where people young and old, regardless of race, political orientation, sex, or religious persuasion forget all their differences and come together … to talk like pirates. International Talk Like a Pirate Day was created in 1995 by Mark Summers and John Baur, now known as The Pirate Guys, or Cap'n Slappy and Ol' Chumbucket respectively. To get a feel for Talk Like a Pirate Day, it is useful to examine one of their self-produced videos available on YouTube called “Talk Like a Pirate Day: The Five A's.” This video ostensibly instructs those new to the pirate lexicon how to talk like a pirate. They introduce five pirate words that begin with the letter “A” and explain what they mean in regular English. The five words selected were glibly chosen for both their pirate sound and their humorous potential. They are: “Ahoy,” “Avast,” “Aye,” “Aye, Aye,” and “Arrr!” While “Ahoy,” “Avast,” and “Aye” are explained in a relatively straightforward, if comic, manner, The Pirate Guys begin to move more toward absurdity with the last two. “Aye, Aye” is a comic doubling of “Aye” that really does not feel any more emphatic than their definition of the regular “Aye,” as one might expect. Essentially, they added it to fill up space and for the comically unnecessary repetition. The last word, “Arrr!” is more difficult to define. Ol' Chumbucket describes it as “a flexible word. It can mean anything you wants it to mean” (Baur and Summers). They go on to describe how it can mean, “‘My team is winning.’ It can mean, ‘My team is losing.’ It can mean that ‘I'm enjoying this beverage’” (Baur and Summers). Cap'n Slappy chimes in at this point with a completely absurd definition. “I would like a muffin” (Baur and Summers). Ol' Chumbucket ends with, “It can even mean, ‘I'm here and alive’” (Baur and Summers). This video sets the humorous tone and the fun to be had in playing with words that Talk Like a Pirate Day is all about. In the spirit of the video, I have structured my paper around the ten “P's” of Talk Like a Pirate Day. Being an academic, I was unable to limit my discussion to just five. They are: popularity, provenance, promulgation, performance, pretending, play, paradox, plunder and pillage, and phonetics. First let us talk about the image of the pirate in popular culture. There has long been a fascination with pirates in literature and the arts. As early as 1724 in England there was a book called A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates which did much to popularize the idea of pirates (West vii–xiii). Pirates have, of course, shown up in later literary works such as Stevenson's Treasure Island and Barrie's Peter Pan. There are numerous pirate-themed sports franchises, pirate re-enactors, pirate museums, and pirate history tours. While these and many other explorations of pirates are serious in nature, often the pirate or the pirate story is situated within what Northrop Frye would call the comic mode (43–52). Several other art works, particularly in plays and film, fall into this group including: Gilbert and Sullivan's play The Pirates of Penzance, and films such as Blackbeard's Ghost (1968), The Pirate Movie (1982), Yellowbeard (1983), The Goonies (1985), Pirates (1986), The Princess Bride (1987), and Muppet Treasure Island (1996). Others, such as the recent Pirates of the Caribbean (2003–2011) series, seem to straddle the world of action and comedy. Pirates also appear online in various formats including homemade and professional videos, music, and pictures. You can even change your Google or Facebook language to “Pirate.” Since no one actually speaks “Pirate” and thus this “language” has no practical value, it is also clearly situated in the comic mode. It's the only holiday we know that started as a sporting injury… My friend John Baur, Ol' Chumbucket, and I were playing racquetball one day and one of us, (we don't remember which one of us) but one of us let out an “Arrr!” in pain and from that point on it just kind of triggered other kinds of pirate talk during the racquetball game. A hard shot we'd say, ‘Aye that was a fine cannonade. You slapped that one off the mizenmast matey.’ (Summers) Ol' Chumbucket went on to say, “by the time the game was over, we realized we had much more fun talking like pirates than we ever did playing racquetball and we decided the world needed a holiday for every man, woman, and child on the planet who was not just allowed, but encouraged to talk like pirates” (Baur, Interview). The story of how they came up with the date for Talk Like a Pirate Day is also worthy of note, largely because it is just quirky enough that it helps lend to the fascination with the whole event. The date of the racquetball game was June 6. According to Ol' Chumbucket, they decided that since June 6 was D-day it was “sort of a sacred day so you don't want to mar it with something as meaningless as Talk Like a Pirate Day” (Baur, Interview). According to Cap'n Slappy, “we settled on September 19th because I was recently divorced and it was my ex-wife's birthday and the date was stuck in my head and I wasn't doing anything with it anymore” (Summers). They chose it as a date they thought they could remember and thus began Talk Like a Pirate Day. The holiday was low key initially with very few practitioners. Cap'n Slappy describes it as, “The first five or six years of this Talk Like a Pirate Day was Jon and me and two other friends calling each other on the phone at work and yelling ‘Arrr!’ and hanging up. That was Talk Like a Pirate Day” (Summers). There's our fifteen minutes of fame. It will probably be over by about two-thirty in the afternoon. But it just got legs, took up, and started running. Within two weeks of this column appearing we'd been on the radio in Ireland and Australia and several cities around the US. We've been on NPR and it just kept going. And every year we think, ‘Well okay this is it. This is as big as it gets. This is as good as it gets.’ And then the next year something happens that's even bigger” (Baur, Interview). While Dave Barry is no doubt largely responsible for the initial success of Talk Like a Pirate Day, there are several other things that The Pirate Guys did to help make the day a success. One of the things they did (after a friend recommended it) was to get a web page, reserving the name www.talklikeapirate.com. While they have placed some significant content on the website explaining the origin of the holiday and some practical advice for talking like pirates, one of the things the site has evolved into is a clearinghouse of links to other pirate themed pages or materials. Ol' Chumbucket stated, “It turns out one of the fun things we've discovered is there have been serious pirate fans and pirate re-enactors all over the place. And groups. But they were all over the place and not connected. What we did was give them a center of focus and suddenly they're everywhere” (Baur, Interview). Beyond giving pirate aficionados a center of focus on the web site, they have also produced several videos (like the one described earlier) on how to talk like a pirate, behave like one, misbehave like one, and the like. They have done numerous television and radio interviews, typically dozens each year around the day, written articles for pirate magazines, written some books, and even made personal appearances (Original). They have also moved into social medial online beyond just their website. They have a Facebook Page, a Flickr page, and a twitter account for Pirate-themed Haikus (or “Pi-Kus” as they are called) (Original). Cap'n Slappy said of Twitter, “I know that on Twitter, for the last two years since I've been on Twitter, I think this year it was 5 of the top 10 categories in different ways on Talk Like a Pirate Day. It trends pretty heavily” (Summers). It has come to a point, however, where it is self-perpetuating. Ol' Chumbucket told me, “the whole thing has taken on a life of its own and if we just walked away from the website tomorrow, there would still be a Talk Like a Pirate Day this September and there would still be a Talk Like a Pirate Day next September. The fact that it no longer needs us is, I think, the biggest sign of its success” (Baur, Interview). For pirates, both of the men are quite humble about the immense success of the holiday. Cap'n Slappy said, “I was in awe and still am a little bit. I had no idea where all of this would go and how big it would become” (Summers). Ol' Chumbucket stated, “No we're not celebrities. We're like curiosities. … We were completely taken by surprise. We had no idea. ‘Shock’ I think is an excellent word for how we felt,” (Baur, Interview). Cap'n Slappy said, “This is one of those things you can't really prepare for. It's one of those serendipitous events that kind of comes out of left field and either you're ready for the wave or you're not” (Summers). Part of riding the wave is how well you do it, which brings us to our next “P.” J. L. Austin, in his Philosophical Papers, talks about performative utterances. These are utterances, different from statements that perform something in the saying of it. He gives examples such as saying “I do” to get married (Austin 222). While Talk Like a Pirate Day does not directly fall into the category of performative utterances, it does share some of the same characteristics and overturns some of the concepts of performative utterances in interesting ways. Austin talks about the act of betting as an example. If I offer to bet money on something and no one takes me up on the offer then it really is not a bet (Austin 224). I would submit that for our purpose a performance requires the agreement of other parties or their involvement. They need to accept that we are talking like pirates and performing in a certain way. It's just in almost any situation you can name, talking like a pirate is inappropriate. Unless you are actually on the quarterdeck of a Seventeenth century sailing ship, then I suppose it's appropriate. You know, at the doctor's office, at work, at church, at school, on a date, when you're out at the bowling league, it's inappropriate. And inappropriate is funny I think. (Baur, Interview) Related to performance is pretending. Austin states of pretending, “Praetendere in Latin never strays far from the literal meaning of holding or stretching one thing in front of another in order to protect or conceal or disguise it” (Austin 208). On Talk Like a Pirate Day that is what we are doing. We are hiding the real thing behind the façade, talking like a pirate when we really are not pirates. “There is necessarily involved in pretence, or shamming, the notion of a limit which must not be overstepped: pretence is always insulated, as it were from reality. Admittedly this limit may be vague, but it must exist” (Austin 201). We of course can talk like pirates, we can swagger and curse like pirates, but we cannot act like real pirates. For instance, the limit is obviously on the near side of capturing shipping vessels on the high seas. Northrop Frye stated, “But the element of play is the barrier that separates art from savagery” (46). Cap'n Slappy said, “I continue to play with the metaphor, but don't play with the behavior of it. Every year somebody writes us and tells us ‘Don't you know pirates are bad people?’ It's like, well, of course, of course we know that. We just don't care because we're not trying to (Summers). there is a talking like a pirate and like a real pirate. In when we talk like a pirate we are really an image of a pirate in popular not a real pirate. Ol' Chumbucket said, I the word pirate, you John or that image of a … century (Baur, Interview). This is what we are really to be or trying to perform It is not a real but one created in popular in film, and you like a do you on Talk Like a Pirate it's called talk like a pirate day … not like a pirate There's a like a pirate It's called There this that we were the pirate and we'd “Arrr!” and all that so we had to like (Baur, Interview) He did one of the of to like pirates was that his is all The of can be in ways other than or with a It can also be taken to an when the Cap'n Slappy describes one such where the has real world He said that got a phone call to do an with the about He said, and they were talking about the real pirates in and me for my on And I was like, the (Summers). While the in did not for an on the situation of in it is interesting that what started out as a and a performance, has now into a of real world they are that image and they are They life by their own and in our not a of for that. We are told by every we get about how we and how we act and what you have to do to be And pirates give a what thought of their (Baur, Interview) There is a in the spirit of the where we can from and the of for a In out his of the to the one might that from the and from the it the of all and Part of the and of is in this or of the states of the and must know to what certain are and must feel the of the to their Pirates can get away with all of inappropriate on Talk Like a Pirate Day can I call my a or to the It is a to be and to do something Ol' Chumbucket stated, get as much out of it as who into a with a to their side and a around their and saying ‘Arrr!’ It's fun to (Baur, Interview). The its own social and as we behave in ways that the social to which life I think pirates as as they are as an they … an of and … is a word. I don't think any up in this who at some point could be a pirate. plays a in it. plays a in it. It's It's the act of at the (Summers) at the of our its and us in a where we are in I would is one of the that pirates so often are in popular in the comic mode. We the that we our of and all the Ol' Chumbucket the spirit of Talk Like a Pirate Day when said, “But one day a year you can swagger and you don't care what the world and you can be You can be as big as you want to And that's a that we don't (Baur, Interview). For our will the idea of a pirate in popular and we are to what be all real pirates were and are and If actually by real pirates, the would be not as a and even we are still to Ol' Chumbucket up this and his own for it “I would have to say, pirates are not I mean, they're Pirates were at and often and they are the of all of funny is like me a pirate in an inappropriate and in an inappropriate (Baur, Interview). This is an The of a who is not a pirate, like a pirate at an inappropriate time and place humorous As later explained his idea in more said, but a in the is always (Baur, talking like and century pirates in the world are out of place and that is with the comic and the comic that has up around the idea of the pirate in popular the whole you know we thought it was funny because we're and just your it works on the you know … where their and and the pirate it you be which I think people to the of the (Summers) I was a up in there was a group called the of the every and these as pirates. They They off the They had They were to as and but as you were to that. that they would you and with if they I don't think that of the away I think the things that us, make us where comes I think is the only to I've always thought that the to move something is to make a out of it. (Summers) that is one of the for the fascination with pirates in popular culture. We are but with the idea of pirates and That in is a Part of the performance of and is the idea of what we get out of it. For real pirates, of course, this or some kind of These were and are people who life and for the that by from Cap'n Slappy said of know we're all pirates at that's anything in their has a of a pirate about It's just what we're to do to get (Summers). of us are not to go to the same as pirates do to That of course the that if people do not get from talking or up like pirates, do they do we get a different kind of from the image but not the of of what we get is of course the by not the and that of from It is It also Ol' Chumbucket said, the people in said, they us for celebrities. not to that feel a pirate (Baur, Interview). We like the of and even fame. It is to be and It's much more a of It's not something that we've off of … We up our website with a of and we're of that the word with we've away and one of the things we said early on was that we want to make this a We want to get off of it. We had this that we other people to have I think that's been of the success of it is that the is pirates we've not been out to I told Like a Pirate not Like a Pirate (Summers) While it would have been to make more money off of the holiday and the that has it, The Pirate Guys have done something They have not been pirates. Austin describes a where a is to be a and takes it He states that the limit that was not a to be a and really a but to be a and like an I want to it one and that in to be a it is also that one not actually be a Part of to be a pirate is not only the pretence, but also requires that one not actually be the thing one is to These pirates are than they give and the of that to be its own Cap'n Slappy describes two of these The first is the that people get out of it. what us the is that people are fun with it” (Summers). The other I think, the of of a of He said, to so many people around the world by one idea that for one day a year can just be and play and have been a to me, to be a of to be there at the of that was (Summers). While of the of their and is a word, it has the of the only word on the that does not make a While this is a little fun on my do play a in the success of Talk Like a Pirate Day. like a pirate, is within the of the of phonetics. The success of Talk Like a Pirate Day, I would is both to the a pirate something as well as the pirate lexicon The things that a pirate has been earlier) are really a of the appearances of the pirate in popular than a of the early pirates Seventeenth and century of course, play an language such as the for and for play a as The and of this kind of in the helps the comic tone of talking like a pirate. much of the success of talking like a pirate does on how something is Cap'n Slappy a word that can describe how to off talking like a pirate, the we've that and people have that as an word at in the pirate (Summers). It does do a of explaining how to make talking like a pirate funny and It requires a that does not to the It requires a to with or with and In the Talk Like a Pirate website has a to pirate such as, the pirate I've ever and to be The of the of course are what make them of course could mean from to in the The useful pirate word of course is which as described is a flexible word. The very of this word and its with pirate it so that can in the holiday by talking like a pirate. It is not when Ol' Chumbucket ends their video by saying those five in and got all the pirate talking you're (Baur and Summers). only is his for those who want to talk like a but also the by into an or at the of a International Talk Like a Pirate Day is a on such a only in the It has a that into something that speaks to many people in the Mark Summers and John were to of the idea and it into something that has taken on a life of its They did not but hard to it. I Ol' Chumbucket about doing an for this said to my to (Baur, 6 I that I have in this To from one of the comic of pirates, Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance, we are with to change for I that I have at to a with that For those who it is often difficult to or explain work to those who are to more can often from to to like International Talk Like a Pirate Day are trends in the worthy of if To those who have things like Talk Like a Pirate Day as something that on the of I to be

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