The History of Talk Like a Pirate Day
A holiday invented on a racquetball court, made famous by a newspaper column.
1995: two friends in Oregon
International Talk Like a Pirate Day was invented in 1995 by two friends from Albany, Oregon, John Baur and Mark Summers. As part of the joke they took pirate names for themselves: Baur became Ol' Chumbucket and Summers became Cap'n Slappy. The story goes that the idea came to them during a racquetball game, when an injury prompted an exclamation of "Arrr!" and the joke grew from there into a full holiday, complete with its own vocabulary and rules.
Why 19 September?
The date was chosen for a simple, unromantic reason: it was the easiest date for the founders to remember, because it happened to be the birthday of Summers' ex-wife. There is no pirate history significance to 19 September at all. It stuck because it was memorable, not because it was meaningful.
2002: Dave Barry makes it famous
For several years the holiday stayed a private joke among friends. That changed in 2002, when the Pulitzer Prize-winning humour columnist Dave Barry wrote about it in his nationally syndicated column. The column introduced the day to a mass audience, and it has been celebrated internationally every 19 September since, picked up by radio stations, retailers, restaurants and, eventually, an entire internet's worth of costume shops and pun-loving marketers.
What it is today
Talk Like a Pirate Day has no formal governing body and no official events calendar. It is celebrated however people feel like celebrating it: by talking in a pirate accent for the day, by throwing a themed party, by running pirate-day promotions, or by dressing up. Its whole appeal is that it costs nothing and asks nothing of you except a willingness to say "arrr" out loud in public.
Next: find out how to talk like a pirate and, for the thing nobody else covers, how to walk like one.