It Be Talk like a Pirate Day, Boy-o

From Language Log (and what more appropriate place to host a longterm discussion of talking like a pirate, for that matter), incited by today's annual occurrence of Talk Like a Pirate Day, this nice image, created by someone who left it out in the open on the internet anonymously some years ago:



On this day twenty-six years ago, with a full-throated "Arrrrrrrrrrrr!" I swung down on a rope from the highest yardarm in the British Navy, grabbed up the prized damsel in my free arm, and pirated her away with me. That would be the pirate way of putting it, I suppose, endorsed by the thinking like a pirate that all this talking like a pirate on this day encourages. For certain values of Arrrr, is what I'm saying, it was just like that, matey.

I got married on this day twenty-six years ago, though I can't square the pirate way of putting it with the wedding day itself, which in honest haze of memory I recall engaging with in a hyperreal daze, stunned by the magnitude of all the great yet still tentative possibilities opened up by taking my part in the act on that day.

Right there in the open field of Aptos Village Park, in front of all the people who cared to see it done, I acted the approved part of the dazed groom. There was little of the swagger, let alone the swinging down on a rope, required of buccaneers from me on that day, as I recall.

Today, twenty-six years on, we're heading over to Monterey to see our special friends the otters at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Happy Anniversay, dear.