Arrgh, my ass; and then again in frustration

Here's a clip from the movie. He doesn't say it here, but you can hear it in his voice.

This past week America celebrated something called "Talk Like  a Pirate Day."  Apparently if you say "arrgh" enough times you sound like a pirate and you are supposed to say it a lot on talk-like-a-pirate day. In addition, you are supposed to be amused with how often you can work the sound into other words in puns and such. It really isn't that important but for some reason I find it incredibly irritating.

Bobby Driscoll as Jim Hawkins and Robert Newton
 as Long John Silver.  He also played the lead in
 "Blackbeard the Pirate" in 1948.

To begin with, who decided all pirates say "arrrgh?"  I doubt one of the most famous of them, Jean Laffite, ever said it.  A cultured Frenchman and a pirate, he circulated at the highest levels of New Orleans society and would surely have lost his welcome should a matriarch of that realm have offered him her arm and he responded with "arrgh."  I doubt the Barbary Pirates of Tripoli said it either, or the Somali pirates of today.  Heck, Jimmy Buffett didn't even say it in his lament "A Pirate Looks at 40."

Now, someone else my age might know where that exclamation came from, all of us who were scared to death by the pirates in the 1936 movie "Treasure Island" when we were kids in the 50s.

That movie starred Wallace Beery as Long John Silver who was prone to saying it as a corruption of the word "aye" meaning agreement and evolving into other meanings as the actor and director saw fit. All modern guesswork at how pirates spoke is based on an actor's interpretation of a fictional character.

A BIT OF A CORRECTION: Something about this reference nagged at me and I took another look at the movie.  What bothered me is the one that scared us in the 50s was in color and this one obviously is not.  I went back to Internet Movie Database and discovered a Disney version released in 1950 and that one was in color. I suspect that's the one that lingers in my memory.  In it Bobby Driscoll played Jim Hawkins and Robert Newton played Long John Silver. I guess now, he is the one I recall as the originator of the phrase.  Assuming this is the one, what can you expect from the memory of a kid who was all of eight years old when he saw it?  And, what can you say about making a mistake in a blog post but, "arrrrrgh?"

OK, with all that said, I guess it's tolerable for one day a year to let folks talk like what they think a pirate talked like.  The only thing to fix it would be to celebrate it as Wallace Beery or Robert Newton Day, or at worst Long John Silver Day, something that's not likely to happen.

So, time to let it go. That's all the arrrghument I want to put up anyway. It's just not that important.

Treasure Island