Friday, September 14, 2007 at 2:02am
How to talk like a drunken bilge rat
Column: Outing the Goddess Within
I'd just finished watching the third installment of "Pirates of the Caribbean" with my son when it became apparent we'd subliminally 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."
Arrrr, it was funny, so it was! In fact, so funny we jumped onto the rigging (the pirate word for 'net) and looked up some pirate themes to create ourselves a harr-harrrrr-me-beauty "Pirate Day" to enjoy while land-locked or on yonder blue seas.
First things first, we needed a pirate name. There were several ports of call offering pirate names, but the first one gave me "Captain Anne Kidd." Shiver me timbers, how boring. The second one was a little better with Pirate Ursula the Bitter, but by far my favorite name (which I've since kept) is:
Dirty Left Eye Lisa
Arrrrr! Boy Wonderful (aka Iron Jimmy Jailbird) and I sailed on through perilous sites of known procrastination and past rocks upon which sirens sang songs about time-wasting in search of more pieces of eight.
Risking scurvy and toe jam, we clicked on maps that were more often than not bogus, we broadsided dial-up directions, and thanks to the winds of good fortune, discovered that there was actually an International Talk Like a Pirate Day already in existence. There was more diggin' to do, though, as this information came to us via the unlikely "What's On at the Butterfly Club" events page, which was fabulous for cabaret fans in Melbourne, but not so good for those with a desire to haul some keel elsewhere around the world.
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 stumbled across the treasure: the home page of the official ITLAP Day.
Founded in 1995 by "two crazy guys" (or, in pirate language, "a pair of rust-buckety hornpipes with barnacles for brains," or, in parrot language, "Mark Summers and John Baur"), International Talk Like a Pirate Day was established on Sept. 19 for no other reason than "it was Mark's ex-wife's birthday, and the only date he could readily recall that wasn't taken up with something like Christmas or the Super Bowl or something."
Naturally, we weighed anchor here for a bit and picked up a great swag of pirate words (the five staple words being Ahoy! Avast! Aye! Aye aye! and Arrrr!), pirate tips and even some pirate pick-up lines (which I've banned Iron Jimmy Jailbird from using ... not because he's too young, but because they're so bad).
But nowhere could I find any real clues about the plot of "Pirates of the Caribbean, At World's End." Days later and I'm still asking: What the heck business did Tia Dalma / Calypso have by turning into a 60-foot seething mass of rabid crabs? The real goddess Calypso, as Odysseus will attest, simply would have kidnapped Barbossa for seven years of sexual imprisonment. Then Zeus (let's equate him to Davy Jones in the movie) would have sent the messenger-god Hermes (let's say, Captain Jack Sparrow) and ... oh, never mind, this is now getting as senseless as the movie's plot.
I'm all for keeping it simple. At least I can be happy that a goddess was featured in a mainstream blockbuster (yaaarrrr!), and that she sent those swaggerin', salty, scurvy dogs a walkin' the plank for a nice, long sleep with the fishes. YAAARRR!
— — —
Dirty Left Eye Lisa (aka Anita Ryan-Revel) is the creatrix of Goddess.com.au, a content-rich website aimed at helping you connect with your beautiful, sassy, intuitive, lovable, sacred and authentic self. She has incorporated her journey into hundreds of articles, countless websites and numerous books, one of which is "The Goddess Guide to Chakra Vitality." You can read more of her columns here. © Copyright 2007 by Anita Ryan-Revel.
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."
Arrrr, it was funny, so it was! In fact, so funny we jumped onto the rigging (the pirate word for 'net) and looked up some pirate themes to create ourselves a harr-harrrrr-me-beauty "Pirate Day" to enjoy while land-locked or on yonder blue seas.
First things first, we needed a pirate name. There were several ports of call offering pirate names, but the first one gave me "Captain Anne Kidd." Shiver me timbers, how boring. The second one was a little better with Pirate Ursula the Bitter, but by far my favorite name (which I've since kept) is:
Arrrrr! Boy Wonderful (aka Iron Jimmy Jailbird) and I sailed on through perilous sites of known procrastination and past rocks upon which sirens sang songs about time-wasting in search of more pieces of eight.
Risking scurvy and toe jam, we clicked on maps that were more often than not bogus, we broadsided dial-up directions, and thanks to the winds of good fortune, discovered that there was actually an International Talk Like a Pirate Day already in existence. There was more diggin' to do, though, as this information came to us via the unlikely "What's On at the Butterfly Club" events page, which was fabulous for cabaret fans in Melbourne, but not so good for those with a desire to haul some keel elsewhere around the world.
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 stumbled across the treasure: the home page of the official ITLAP Day.
Founded in 1995 by "two crazy guys" (or, in pirate language, "a pair of rust-buckety hornpipes with barnacles for brains," or, in parrot language, "Mark Summers and John Baur"), International Talk Like a Pirate Day was established on Sept. 19 for no other reason than "it was Mark's ex-wife's birthday, and the only date he could readily recall that wasn't taken up with something like Christmas or the Super Bowl or something."
Naturally, we weighed anchor here for a bit and picked up a great swag of pirate words (the five staple words being Ahoy! Avast! Aye! Aye aye! and Arrrr!), pirate tips and even some pirate pick-up lines (which I've banned Iron Jimmy Jailbird from using ... not because he's too young, but because they're so bad).
But nowhere could I find any real clues about the plot of "Pirates of the Caribbean, At World's End." Days later and I'm still asking: What the heck business did Tia Dalma / Calypso have by turning into a 60-foot seething mass of rabid crabs? The real goddess Calypso, as Odysseus will attest, simply would have kidnapped Barbossa for seven years of sexual imprisonment. Then Zeus (let's equate him to Davy Jones in the movie) would have sent the messenger-god Hermes (let's say, Captain Jack Sparrow) and ... oh, never mind, this is now getting as senseless as the movie's plot.
I'm all for keeping it simple. At least I can be happy that a goddess was featured in a mainstream blockbuster (yaaarrrr!), and that she sent those swaggerin', salty, scurvy dogs a walkin' the plank for a nice, long sleep with the fishes. YAAARRR!
— — —
Dirty Left Eye Lisa (aka Anita Ryan-Revel) is the creatrix of Goddess.com.au, a content-rich website aimed at helping you connect with your beautiful, sassy, intuitive, lovable, sacred and authentic self. She has incorporated her journey into hundreds of articles, countless websites and numerous books, one of which is "The Goddess Guide to Chakra Vitality." You can read more of her columns here. © Copyright 2007 by Anita Ryan-Revel.