Small Pirate and Lesse Greeke, Arrr
Posted by R. J. O’Hara for the Collegiate Way
18 September 2006 (collegiateway.org) — The learned readership of the Collegiate Way certainly doesn’t need to be reminded that tomorrow is International Talk-Like-a-Pirate Day. But truth be told, how many of us have kept up with the language we studied so assiduously in our youth? Those long hours spent in Beginning Pirate and Intermediate Pirate have receded so far into the past that I bet many of us can remember today only a few fragments of vocabulary and almost no grammar. (“Small Pirate and lesse Greeke.â€)
Not to worry. This brief video will bring you back up to speed, and will help you avoid those embarrassing moments around the water cooler in the Senior Common Room when you can’t seem to remember the difference between arrr! and yarrr!
But wherefore this exhortation? (On the Collegiate Way there’s always a moral.) Because, as Cardinal Newman famously said, a college should be an alma mater, a nourishing mother, who knows her children one by one—and laughs and plays with them, too. It should not be a foundry or a mint or a treadmill.
Does your college have its own playful annual traditions? If not, why would anyone feel any special attachment to the place? One of my residential college students once said, “I’ve never lived anywhere that had so many inside jokes.†Your students (and your fellows) should be saying the same thing, matey. Yarrr.
Did you miss International Talk-Like-a-Pirate Day this year? Fear not: later this month, on September 28th, the Day of Doom is coming!
