Are You Celebrating International Talk Like a Pirate Day With Your Kids? You Should!

How it all started ...   (Excerpt from Official International Talk Like A Pirate Day Website)
Arrr! We be the pirate guys, matey.

Or, in another vernacular, we are guys, John Baur and Mark Summers. And that really should be all you need to know about the origins of Talk Like a Pirate Day. We're guys. Not men, with responsibility and suits and power ties. We're guys, with all that that implies. But here are the details.

Once upon a time -- on June 6, 1995, to be precise -- we were playing Raquetball, not well but gamely. It wasn't our intention to become "the pirate guys." Truth to tell, it wasn't really our intention to become anything, except perhaps a tad thinner and healthier, and if you could see our photos, you'd know how THAT turned out. As we flailed away, we called out friendly encouragement to each other -"Damn, you bastard!" and "Oh, jeez, my hamstring!" for instance - as shots caromed away, unimpeded by our wildly swung rackets.

On this day, for reasons we still don't quite understand, we started giving our encouragement in pirate slang. Mark suspects one of us might have been reaching for a low shot that, by pure chance, might have come off the wall at an unusually high rate of speed, and strained something best left unstrained. "Arrr!," he might have said.

Who knows? It might have happened exactly that way.

Anyway, whoever let out the first "Arrr!" started something. One thing led to another. "That be a fine cannonade," one said, to be followed by "Now watch as I fire a broadside straight into your yardarm!" and other such helpful phrases.

By the time our hour on the court was over, we realized that lapsing into pirate lingo had made the game more fun and the time pass more quickly. We decided then and there that what the world really needed was a new national holiday, Talk Like A Pirate Day.

First, we needed a date for the holiday. As any guy can tell you, June 6 is the anniversary of World War II's D-Day. Guys hold dates like that in reverence and awe so there was no way we could use June 6.

Mark came up with September 19. That was and is his ex-wife's birthday, and the only date he could readily recall that wasn't taken up with something like Christmas or the Super Bowl or something. We also decided -- right then and there on the court on June 6, 1995 -- that the perfect spokesman for our new holiday was none other than Dave Barryhimself, nationally syndicated humor columnist and winner of the Pulitzer by-God Prize. So, naturally, we forgot all about it.
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Now, occasionally Sept. 19 falls on a Sunday, and we recognize that may not meet everyone's desire for an excuse to party. While a lot of fun can be had celebrating TLAPD in a church setting (The choir will now sing, "How Great Thou Aaarrrrt!") we're suggesting that those of a more secular bent consider celebrating Talk Like A Pirate Weekend.