Arrrg! Happy Talk like a Pirate Day..

[Brian Gaff]

Avarst Behind Landlubbers. My DIY Wooden leg has Death watch Beetle, Brian

[Brian Gaff]

grin, and ye should walk the plank for that terrible joke, argh.

Brian

[Bert Coules]

Q: Why are pirates so difficult to understand?

A: They just Arrrr.

[NY]

That reminds me of the amazing phrase the DI Jack Regan (John Thaw) once used in an episode of The Sweeney "The hairs on my wooden leg tell me that something's about to happen" (in other words, he is suspicious and has a hunch). It's slightly prophetic, given that when he started to play Inspector Morse, he was seen to be limping occasionally and it was *alleged* that he had a false leg (in fact it was a legacy of an old injury which affected him more in older age).

Shiver My Timbers (whatever that means!) Splice the Mainbrace and Hoist the Mainsail Doubloons and Pieces of Eight

I wonder why it is that pirates always stereotypically talk with a strong Summerset/Devon/Cornwall accent - as opposed to the accent of any other coastal location. Maybe because Cornwall is the closest English county to Spain and the West Indies, which is where a lot of bounty-hunting, piracy and even legitimate naval battles took place.

[charles]

even W S Gilbert thought pirates came from Penzance.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Never been in an all wood structure when it receives a sharp blow?

Slam the doors to this house and its timbers all shiver

I suspect its what happens when a stimber ship strikes a reef.

[jeikppkywk]

And that happens when they come alongside the ship they are pirating too. And when the cannon balls hit their ship too.

[jgh]

Rather prosaically, it's because a lot of the pirate films in the 1950s featured Robert Newton, an actor with a strong west country accent, so in the film-going public "pirate" became synonymous with "ooo arr!"

[Brian Gaff]

Yes and his name was stains, I know I know... Brian

[Brian Gaff]

Do Pirate vampires have Undead parr-ots? Brian

[Brian Gaff]

Has Penzance got any access to the sea? :-) Brian

[Brian Gaff]

Some people in Dorset sound more like Pirates to me in point of fact, particularly those who have spent some time in the Isle of Wight extension to Hampshire. Brian

[Chris Hogg]

Good god no - it's in the middle of Arizona!

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

The Natural Philosopher expressed precisely :

I would thought it referred to shaking my bones, or my skeleton rather than a timber frame.

[Chris Hogg]

and of course shivering can mean breaking into lots of pieces, not just shaking.

[Marland]

Isle of Wight became a County in its own right in 1890 when it stopped being an overseas territory of Hampshire. Some things are still shared like the Police but not too much, took over a hundred years for a lot of the links to dwindle which may give an indication of how long it may take to really disentangle the UK from the EU whatever agreement or none eventually is reached.

GH

[Marland]

And the tradition of seafaring from the South Western Counties to explorethe new world was particularly strong ,see where Drake ,Raleigh,Cabot, Grenville etc launched their ventures from. ISTR that there are some islands off mainland USA whose fishing communities remained fairly isolated till the mid 20th century whose population spoke with an accent similar to the UK West Country one till fairly recently.

Ahh here it is

GH

GH