September 19 is Talk Like a Pirate Day. It’s fun and easy and a little bit weird (that’s a good thing) – you just try to talk like a pirate.
Step 1: Greet people with “Ahoy!” If the inventor of the telephone got his way, this is what we’d be saying every time we answered it.
Step 2: Whenever you don’t know what to say, say “Arrr!”
Step 3: Growl a lot. Say all the regular things like a grumbling, rumbling animal…or like someone who has been stuck on a boat with no microwave oven, no television and *gasp!* no showers for a couple of months.
Quite seriously – we love Talk Like a Pirate Day. The American “R” sound is one of the hardest for English Language Learners to master, and being in Boston doesn’t help since locals often drop it, too! Some experts think the pirate accent comes from an actor who was cast as a pirate in several movies. He used the accent from southwest England, where many pirates in English history came from. You can also hear a strong R in Irish speech, but many other regions and many other languages give that letter a different sound. So today’s fun “holiday” is a great opportunity to practice this tricky bit of American English.
We’ve got pirate books on the yellow bookshelf:
- The Pirate Who Said Please
- The Tail of Reepicheep (Narnia: Prince Caspian)
- Pirate School
- True-Life Treasure Hunts
- Pirates: Robbers of the High Seas
- On the Go with Pirate Pete and Pirate Joe
- Pirates Past Noon (Magic Tree House #4)
- The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle
- Captain Grey
- Pirateology
