AWADmail Issue 228
September 24, 2006
A Compendium of Feedback on the Words in A.Word.A.Day
and Other Interesting Tidbits about Words and Languages
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From: Terrence Weddle (tmweddle aol.com)
Subject: Re: A.Word.A.Day--buccaneer
Refer: http://wordsmith.org/words/buccaneer.html
A buck an ear is a high price to pay for corn. But a low price to pay an
audiologist!
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From: Francis Roe (cfroe aol.com)
Subject: Re: A.Word.A.Day--buccaneer
The word buccaneer reminds me of a story I heard a long time ago back in
Scotland. On Guy Fawkes night (British equivalent of Halloween) a little
boy was visiting his neighbors dressed as a pirate Captain, complete with
tricorn hat and eyepatch. He knocked at the door of a little old lady who
lived down the road. "Oh my goodness!" said the LOL, "You're a Pirate!"
Then she asked, "But where are your buccaneers?" The little boy looked her
in the eye, shrugged, and replied, "Under my buccan hat!"
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From: John K. (kenai279 excite.com)
Subject: Re: A.Word.A.Day--buccaneer
Buccaneers are an important element in the FSM religion which has discovered
that the decline in Pirates over the years is directly correlated with
global warming. http://www.venganza.org/
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From: Michael Poole (michael.poole cw.mitsubishielectric.co.jp)
Subject: Re: A.Word.A.Day--buccaneer
I imagine that rather than John Newton establishing a Cornish accent as
suitable for a pirate, casting a Cornishman as Long John Silver was
regarded as appropriate owing to his accent. "Treasure Island" starts off
in Cornwall, as no doubt RLS was well aware that the West Country was
for long the main starting-point of transatlantic traffic from England
(it remained so until the liners became too large for Bristol and
Plymouth). Not only did many of the pirates of old probably speak with
West Country accents, because of hailing from there, but the North American
accents of today are recognisably descended from same -- notably the
values of the vowels and the prominent within-word and trailing "r"
sounds that the rest of England tends to suppress. As a child, when I
met one particular Cornishman, I at first thought he was a Canadian!
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From: Brooks N. Clark (nbclark tva.gov)
Subject: Pirate Talk Actually Catches English Amid the Vowel Shift
Arg. Shiver me timbers.
In a lecture series-on-tape on the development of the English language that
I got from my local library, a Stanford linguistics professor described
the great "vowel shift" in English that left us so many rhymes in poetry
that are no longer rhymes (and my own name which went from Clark to Clerk
and horse race that went from Darby to Derby and the town that went from
Hertford to Hartford).
The professor said that, hearing what the vowels used to sound like, a
student said it was "pirate talk", and the professor said, in fact, that's
what it was. The Pirates' language was frozen in the decades when English
made that vowel shift, and that's one reason it sounds so distinctive to us.
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From: Ross Miller (boatmiller snet.net)
Subject: Talking Like a Pirate (A True Story)
A few weeks ago we were sailing back into port, threading our way at a
leisurely pace downwind through the mooring field, when we came abreast of
some highly inebriated folks enjoying the afternoon aboard a safely tethered
boat.
"Arrgh!" their leader called out, "We're pirates, ye know!"
"Aye, and so are we," I replied.
"Arrgh," he said.
"And do ye know what the eighteenth letter of the pirate alphabet is?" I
asked him.
"No," he hollered back.
"It's 'Arrgh', matey, it's 'Arrgh'," I bellowed, hoping that we were beyond
the range of his guns.
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From: Zach Shatz (prismind hotmail.com)
Subject: pirates
No one should be deprived of the laugh from a recent "Bizarro" comic strip.
A pirate playing "Wheel of Fortune" says "Rrrrrr!" The gameshow host
replies, "For the last time, you've already guessed that letter!"
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From: Claudia (claimsgoddess yahoo.com)
Subject: talk like a pirate day
On the morning of Tuesday, 9/19/06, I was advised by my favorite radio
announcer that he had just read his AWAD and it was National Talk Like a
Pirate Day. He further advised that he would not talk like a pirate because
doing so would end his radio career. He then intoned the time (as morning
radio personnel do frequently) and the station call letters: WQX...arrrrh...FM!
And the music was: no, not Pirates of Penzance, but the overture from Le
Corsaire by Berlioz, followed shortly by Dance of the Pirates from Spartacus
by Khachaturian.
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From: Jan Adkins (j.adkins verizon.net)
Subject: pirates
I'm an author of non-fiction for children, and recently finished What If You
Met a Pirate? The research was delicious, though puzzling. Pirates weren't
the bloodthirsty villains in the movies, and they didn't voyage about in the
big gunships of the Errol Flynn movies. They were hard-nosed businessmen who
signed articles of agreement on joining, elected their captains
democratically, and fired them when they failed to produce.
They preferred small, weatherly vessels of shallow draft and killed as few
as possible. Dead men were worthless; live men could be ransomed or could
"give quarter", pay back a quarter of their next year's wages to go free. At
a time when honor meant something, a man who gave his word sent the money.
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From: Sara E. (sme_proj_as yahoo.com)
Subject: Re: A.Word.A.Day--Jolly Roger
Refer: http://wordsmith.org/words/jolly_roger.html
I am reading a book, Pirate Curse by Kai Meyer, in which one character tells
another, "...all the pirates here in the Caribbean had red flags, so the
French called them jolie rouge, which means 'pretty red'. And then the
English made 'Jolly Roger' out of it, and the black pirate flags are still
called that today."
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From: Martha Bihari (marthabihari2002 hotmail.com)
Subject: Re: A.Word.A.Day--avast
Refer: http://wordsmith.org/words/avast.html
Now I know why my antivirus program was named "Avast!".
It sure makes good sense.
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From: Jeb Raitt (jbrmm266 aol.com)
Subject: Re: A.Word.A.Day--avast
But not only pirates. The term was and is a general nautical term, used now
in naval parlance to instruct the cessation of specific activity, such as
pulling (heaving) a line (rope). "Avast heaving!" means, "Stop pulling on
that rope!"
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From: Polly M. Law (pmlaw thrumsend.com)
Subject: Word project
I wrote to you two years ago about an art/illustration project I was
doing based on words I had gotten through A.Word.A.Day. Well, there
is currently a show of those words/works hanging at a gallery in
Woodstock, NY: http://www.thrumsend.com/WP.html
............................................................................
It is probably no mere historical accident that the word person, in its
first meaning, is a mask. It is rather a recognition of the fact that
everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role.
-Robert Ezra Park, sociologist (1864-1944)
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