Cutlass, check. Wooden leg, check. Parrot, check. With any luck you’ll have remembered it’s International Talk Like A Pirate Day and you’ll be dressed in your finest swashbuckling attire.
This raucously fun yearly event sees landlubbers across the globe down tools, dress like extras from Treasure Island and yell indecipherable salty sea dog phrases in each other’s faces.
It’s not enough to look the part though, you’ll have to brush up on high seas jargon too… which is where we step in with these handy tips and phrases:
While the basics – Ahoy! Avast! Aye!, Aye aye! and Arrr! – are pretty easy to master, the founders of International Talk Like A Pirate Day have compiled a handy “how to” guide (with French, Dutch and German translations).
With special thanks to Capn’ Slappy and Ol’ Chumbucket, we’ve collated the most useful phrases below, but for a full glossary of terms, take yourself down to the official British HQ.
- Dead men tell no tales – phrase indicating to leave no survivors
- Grog – An alcoholic drink, usually rum diluted with water, but in this context you could use it to refer to any alcoholic beverage other than beer, and we aren’t prepared to be picky about that, either. Call your beer grog if you want. We won’t stop you! Water aboard ship was stored for long periods in slimy wooden barrels, so you can see why rum was added to each sailor’s water ration – to kill the rancid taste.
- Keelhaul – punishment in which a person where dragged underneath the pirate ship from side to side and was lacerated by the barnacles on the vessel
- Feed the fish – will soon die
- Batten down the hatches – put everything away on the ship and tie everything down because a storm is brewing
- Hornswaggle – to defraud or cheat out of money or belongings
- Landlubber – big, slow clumsy person who doesn’t know how to sail
- Poop deck – the part of the ship farthest to the back, which is usually above the captain’s quarters. This is not the bathroom
- Weigh anchor and hoist the mizzen! – pull up the anchor and the sail and let’s get going
- Scurvy dog – the pirate is talking directly to you with mild insult
- Bilge rat – a rat that lives in the worst place on the ship (lowest levels). Pirates, just like their modern-day counterparts (regular guys), love to joke and jibe with their buddies. By all means, pirates will call their buddies “bilge rats.
- Black spot – to be ‘placin’ the black spot’ be markin’ someone for death.
- Davy Jones’ Locker – the bottom o’ the sea, where the souls of dead men lie.
Double up on all your adjectives and you’ll be bountifully bombastic with your phrasing. Pirates never speak of “a big ship”, they call it a “great, grand ship!” They never say “never”, they say “No nay ne’er!”
Drop all your “g”‘s when you speak and you’ll get words like “rowin'”, “sailin'” and “fightin'”. Dropping all of your “v”‘s will get you words like “ne’er”, “e’er” and “o’er”.
Instead of saying “I am”, sailors say, “I be”. Instead of saying “You are”, sailors say, “You be”. Instead of saying, “They are”, sailors say, “They be”. Ne’er speak in anythin’ but the present tense!
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