Some might ask, why post about pirate-talk on a science blog. A few reasons: (1) why not? (2) you can't deny that talking like a pirate is super-fun, (3) I just got back from the Caribbean and although this isn't the scientific paper I promised it is still applicable, and (4) although it isn't directly linked to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster it does have some fun tie-ins.
ITLAPD started on June 6, 1995 when John Baur and Mark Summers were playing racquetball. During the game they started giving encouragement in pirate-slang. One thing led to another until they decided that there really needed to be a national new holiday, Talk Like a Pirate Day. Mark came up with September 19th, his ex-wife's birthday (I'm sure she was so flattered), and they decided that Dave Barry would be the perfect spokesman. Things stayed pretty quiet after that. Until 2002 when they chanced upon Dave Barry's email address and explained their idea to him. Dave responded affirmatively and "all hell broke loose." Since then ITLAPD has become an international phenomenon.
That explanation covers most of the points on my why-list except for the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM). Now I'm not going to go all into this topic because the subjects aren't directly linked, they simply share a common topic...pirates. The Church of FSM emerged when Bobby Henderson posted this open letter to the Kansas School Board after their decision to permit the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in public school science classes (but perhaps that is a topic for another day). Essentially, the Church of FSM believes that an invisible and undetectable flying spaghetti monster created the universe. Pirates were the original Pastafarians and were peaceful explorers until Christian misinformation listed them as outcast criminals. This actually supports that the religion is totally legit because it is backed by hard science, as evidenced by the pirate vs. global temperature data. If you refer to the graph below you will clearly see that as the numbers of pirates have decreased the average global temperature has increased. And here we find the unintentional but fantastic link between ITLAPD and FSM. Perhaps if more of us adopted piratey ways then we could decrease or even reverse global temperature rise.
So practice up on the pirate-talk ye scurvy dawgs and help to fight global warming. Arrrr....
The Official Site for International Talk Like a Pirate Day
Talk Like a Pirate Day UK Headquaters
Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
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