Calypso Inspiration: How To Talk Like a Pirate Wench

As I wrote in my column this week, I’d just finished watching the third instalment of Pirates of the Caribbean with my son when it became apparent we’d slipped into pirate lingo. Boy Wonderful’s simple request for food, for example, became:

Boy Wonderful: “I need some grub in me bung-hole yer dirty land-lubbin’ son of a bilge rat.”

Me: “Bwaarck! Polly wanna cracker?” (Oh, wait. That’s for Talk Like a parrot Day.) No, what I really said was, “If it’s a bucket of slop yer after, there be some swill through yonder galley porthole,” except said in the accent of Tia Dalma (the character in the aforementioned movie who is actually the goddess Calypso bound into human form) so it came out more like, “a-hdaa-me-darrr-la-deeerrr-me-hiiiiy.”

That's when we decided we needed more lessons on how to speak like a true pirate (or in my case, a true goddess Calypso). Here are the three steps we took to learn pirate language:

1. We got ourselves some fabulous pirate names. At BlogThings I became Dirty Left Eye Lisa and Boy Wonderful was renamed Iron Jimmy Jailbird.

2. We weighed anchor at the International Talk Like a Pirate Day for a bit and picked up a great swag of pirate words (the five staple words being Ahoy! Avast! Aye! Aye aye! And Arrrr!)

3. Then, with shovels-a-shovelin’ and sweat-a-pourin’ offava our necks like we was nothin’ more than the underbelly of a taste of the Cap’n’s daughter, we practised and practised and practised!

I'm happy with that, providing I don't suddenly grow to 60-feet tall and spew crabs across the deck of a black pearl...