[For a Talking Like a Pirate audio version of this essay, listen here]

𝓡𝓔𝓒𝓐𝓛𝓛 𝓨𝓔 𝓐 𝓣𝓘𝓜𝓔 when the internet were an open sea, ripe for the taking? When the abyssal floor of the vasty deep lay yet unblemished by the scuttled fads of yore, when any meme what had the faintest whiff o’ whimsy could run rampant o’er the waves from Barrataria to Madagascar, ne’er to be dashed upon algorithmic shoals or becalmed in the doldrums of irony poisoning? Well, do ye?

For ’twas such a time, one score and nine years ago, when International Talk Like a Pirate Day were christened. ‘Twas then that a pair o’ landlubbers named Summers and Baur, from Albany, Oregon, decided to fashion, from the thin gruel o’ one’s pained yawp at a game o’ racquetball, an annual tradition what says one ought to spend September 19th ‘Talking Like a Pirate’1By which, of course, is meant speaking in an exaggerated West Country English accent swabbed o’er with a thin cast of pseudo-Shakespearean vocabulary and usage, as popularized by Robert Newton’s performance in Treasure Island (1950) and reified by countless imitators since, for as befits a postmodern holiday the practice it entails be but the performance o’ a simulacrum of a simulacrum..

Gen X marks the spot for this manner o’ ironical observance, being folk what also embraced Festivus and Pi Day round about that same year o’ nineteen hundred and ninety-five. There were somethin’ in the air o’ that time, one supposes, what made folk yen for novel traditions; deracinated, desacralized, flutterin’ around at the End o’ History like a standard in a gale, they grabbed at shiny postmodern jubilees as they strove in vain to refill their empty coffers o’ meanin’.

Much as the once-private tradition o’ Festivus were spread by means of appearing on Seinfeld, Talk Like a Pirate Day sailed into the open ocean o’ culture via the rather more ignominious channel o’ the humor column of Dave Barry in 2002, whence it voyaged far and wide in the years to come. The broader currents o’ culture were thereabouts trending towards the piratical, what with the huge success o’ the first Pirates of the Caribbean film in 2003 servin’ to refresh the pirate archetype in the minds o’ the Millennial youth2The folk o’ the time loved Jack Sparrow an’ no mistake, but by my reckonin’ the film’s greatest boon to TLAPD be the scenery-devouring performance o’ Geoffrey Rush as Barbossa, whose discursive yet piratical loquacity remains immensely fun to imitate..

In the heady days o’ Web 2.0, TLAPD were situated to plunder the virgin lanes o’ Myspace feeds and Facebook Events with wild abandon. Since pirates were part o’ the trochaic memeplex, the merry band o’ ‘lol so random’ posters what ruled the internet in those days3As were parodied in 2006 with the infamous “t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m” copypasta, as a f’rinstance. considered interest and humor to inhere in the very concept o’ speakin’ like them. The holiday possessed the qualities o’ bein’ uncontroversial, comprehensible, gently anarchic, and staking its claim early. It were smooth sailing ahead.

Like flash mobs, Jib Jab, and the East India Company before it, Talk Like a Pirate Day briefly conquered the world. The scallywags o’ the Pastafarian movement4A parodic sect run by online atheist ironists what is occasionally used to force freedom o’ religion cases in court, but mainly just exists to sell bumper stickers o’ the Flying Spaghetti Monster. adopted TLAPD as their official high holy day. By 2008, the merchant lords o’ Facebook itself got in on the gag, adding “Pirate” to the site’s language options so that members what wished to could recast all system text into a faux-piratical patois. Reddit followed suit in 2010.

But then, like the Golden Age o’ Piracy itself, TLAPD faded away as the world changed around it. Other artificers contrived their own trivial holidays, and the internet’s calendars choked under scores an’ grosses o’ meaningless observances. The Pirates of the Caribbean movies got weird, then bad, then passé. New trochees cycled in, the old ones now overplayed and cringe. Layers upon layers o’ irony built up like barnacles on a hull, burying the original spirit o’ ’90s irreverence what had built the holiday like so much rotten timber.

Withal, the world simply realized that the joke o’ Talk Like a Pirate Day weren’t funny. As a matter o’ fact, we realized, there had never been a joke at all. A non sequitur, a meme, a vibe now extinct perhaps, but never a punchline. Whatever ’twas what drew folk to it, ’twere but an illusion what flickered on the horizon o’ the aughts internet. A green flash what once was seen by everyone, then no one.