1220. In honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day, we look at the history of eight pirate words, and then we look at whether the right pairing is "none is" or "none are."
1220. In honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day, we look at the history of eight pirate words, and then we look at whether the right pairing is "none is" or "none are."
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and this week, we’ll celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day with some fun, pirate-y words, and then I have a Quick and Dirty Tip about the word “none.”
by Mignon Fogarty
International Talk Like a Pirate Day is coming up on September 19th, so today we’ll talk about pronunciations and phrases associated with these seafaring scoundrels!
For example, you may be wondering why pirates are usually portrayed as speaking a rhotic variety of English, emphasizing the R-sound after vowels and saying “Arr.”
One theory is that many famous pirates, including Blackbeard (real) and Long John Silver (fictional), were said to come from a British region known to have a strong rhotic West Country accent.
Pirates also came from other regions, and “Arr” was used in some depictions of pirates before the 1950s, but the actor Robert Newton is largely responsible for popularizing the “Arr” sound for depicting pirates. Newton played Long John Silver in the movie “Treasure Island” in 1950 and Blackbeard in the movie “Blackbeard, the Pirate” in 1952.
Newton grew up in the same West Country region in southwestern England often associated with these pirates, and he used an exaggerated version of the local accent to portray the pirates on film, and the hard-R accent has been associated with pirates ever since. But pirates weren’t a homogenous group. There were Scottish pirates, French pirates, Spanish pirates, and so on, so you can’t really say there was one specific way that pirates talked. Some may have said “Arr,” but a lot probably didn’t. We don’t have any recordings or many writings with pronunciation clues to help us figure it out.
The word “pirate” itself is old. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is “Of multiple origins. Partly a borrowing from French [and] partly a borrowing from Latin.” Many languages have a similar sounding term for these sea raiders including Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German, and Italian. Etymology Online traces it all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European word “per-ya-.”
Other long-used names for pirates include “buccaneers” and “freebooters.”
The word “buccaneer” was first used to describe someone who dried meat on a boucan, which was a type of barbecue. In the 17th-century West Indies, French settlers who hunted wild hogs and cattle and preserved the meat this way were called boucaniers. Some of those French hunters turned to piracy “after being driven from their trade by Spanish authorities,” according to Etymology Online, and thus, “buccaneer” became another word for “pirate.”
"Freebooters” is another word for “pirate” that surprised me because I’ve only heard it used recently to refer to online pirates—usually to refer to people who steal other people’s YouTube videos and post them to their own accounts—but it also goes way back. You can trace it to a Dutch word in the 1500s that meant “free booty” as in “free plunder or profit” that led to the word “vrijbuiter,” which meant pirate or robber—someone who goes after that free booty. From the Dutch “vrijbuiter,” English-speaking people called pirates “freebooters.”
And another current word you’ll know that has surprising origins in piracy is “filibuster.” It goes back to that same Dutch word that gives us “freebooter,” this time coming to English via the Spanish, who called pirates in the West Indies and Central America “filibustero.” (The French also called pirates a name from the same origin: “flibustier.”)
In English, “filibuster” originally referred to those same West Indies and Central American pirates, but in the 1850s and 1860s it also came to refer to outlaw adventurers from the United States who, according to Etymology Online, “tried to overthrow Central American governments.”
A few years later it was used to describe a senator who tried to obstruct the normal function of the legislature. A filibuster described a person kind of like a gardener describes a person and a player describes a person. And eventually, the word came to refer to the act itself. So someone who is filibustering is essentially pirating the senate (or other governing body).
Now, what about some pirate sayings?
Sources say it’s not known whether real-life pirates said things such as “Avast!” and “Shiver me Timbers!” but the OED does list them as nautical terms or at least made up nautical terms.
“Timber” is another word for wood, and “timbers” can refer to the wooden ribs or frame of a ship. One old meaning of the verb “shiver” was to break something apart into fragments or splinters. For example, in an 1815 book by James Smith called “The Panorama of Science and Art,” the speaker describes how an electrical shock can break glass placed under a weight:
“The glass, under such management, is generally shivered into small pieces.”
So “Shiver me timbers!” would be an exclamation that means something like “Well, break my ship apart!”
The OED editors don’t seem to think pirates really said it though. They call it a “mock oath” that comes from “comic fiction.”
“Avast” seems more likely to have been a real nautical term. Dictionary entries say it probably comes from a “worn-down” Dutch phrase that meant “hold fast.” So when a pirate says, “Avast, matey!” he’s telling you to stop or hold up.
Finally, thinking about pirates got me thinking about why we say both “care-ihb-BE-uhn” and “cuh-RIB-be-uhn.” We have the song “Caribbean Queen” and the movie “Pirates of the Caribbean,” but also the cruise ship company Royal Caribbean.
The word “Caribbean” comes from the name of some of the people who live in the area—the Carib. [pronounced CARE-ib, kind of like the chocolate substitute carob] That would imply that “care-ihb-BE-uhn” is the correct pronunciation, but that’s not what I’m seeing from looking at references. Dictionaries list both pronunciations as acceptable (and there are actually even more than those two).
A 1998 survey of 2,000 British people by John Wells, author of the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, found that 91% preferred stress on the third syllable — “care-ihb-BE-uhn.” I couldn't find comparable numbers for American speakers, but a 2010 book called "A Course in Phonetics" does concur that “care-ihb-BE-uhn” is more common among British speakers and says “cuh-RIB-be-uhn” is more common among Americans. But either way, it’s clear from dictionaries and what you just hear in the world that people use both pronunciations in both countries.
Finally, I checked with Tobias S. Buckell, a science fiction author I follow on Bluesky who is from the region. He said that even he uses both pronunciations. For example, someone once noticed that he says he’s a “Kur-ri-byun born writer,” but he’ll say that he “flew down to to the Carry-be-un.” That someone speculated it’s related to the part of speech (Kur-ri-byun for an adjective and Carry-be-un for the noun), but Tobias thinks it probably depends more on the melodic rhythm of the sentence.
In the end, all I can say is that both pronunciations are fine. One isn’t better or more “right” than the other.
by Mignon Fogarty
When you’re thinking about singulars and plurals, you often consider whether you have one or many of something, but the word “none” is tricky because it’s nothing — it’s not one or many of something.
The truth is that ”none” can be singular or plural, but many people believe it can only be singular. First, let’s talk about the singular.
When "none" means roughly “not one” or “no single one,” it’s usually followed by a singular verb. It also takes a singular verb when it’s followed by a mass noun, like “water”:
None of the water is polluted.
But when "none" means roughly “not any” or your sentence has a sense of plurality, “none" can take a plural verb, and it often sounds more natural.
I talked to the boys, and none of them are coming to the party.
You may be chided when you follow "none" with a plural verb, but you're in the right if your sentence calls for it. The AP Stylebook, the Chicago Manual of Style, Garner’s Modern English Usage, the Oxford English Dictionary, and the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Note all say it’s fine to use a plural verb with the word “none” if it means something like “no two,” “not any,” or “no amount of these things.” In fact, the American Heritage Usage Note gives many examples from important writers and even throws down an example from the King James Bible:
All the drinking vessels of King Solomon were of gold ... none were of silver.
Now sometimes either a singular or a plural verb will work:
Should it be
None of them is brave. (Not one of them is brave.)
or
None of them are brave. (Not any of them are brave.)
In cases like that, you can use the word that sounds more natural to you, or you can also just use the singular verb to play it safe. (None of them is brave.)
So that’s your Quick and Dirty Tip. “None” can be singular or plural. Try to decide whether it means “not one” — in which case it’s singular — or “not any” — in which case it’s plural. And If you aren’t sure, “none is” is safer.
Finally, I have a familect from Anna.
Hello. My name is Anna from Reno, Nevada.
My familect — or I should say friendlect — I'll talk about a term that me and my friends use where we'll say that somebody is "under the bed." So we play a lot of D&D, and sometimes when we're playing D&D, we'll have the party split up. So one person's character will go do this thing; other people's characters will go do a different thing, etc. We'll just split the party. And if somebody who isn't with the current group tries to add something or give us some advice, then we'll usually say that, like, "No, you're under the bed right now," as a reference to this one time where we were spying on someone in the game, and we had one of our party members go and hide underneath their bed to spy on them and see what they did before they went to sleep at night. And then some others of us went and did other things, and then the player who was under the bed tried to add something, say like, "Oh, you guys should do this!" And then we were like, "Yeah, but we can't really hear your advice right now. You're under the bed!" So now we say that whenever someone's not in the scene and adds something.
Thanks, Anna. I think that's our first story that comes from D&D, and maybe the first from any kind of tabletop game. I love it!
Thanks also to Marlen R. who joined Grammarpalooza on Patreon this week at the Immortals levels, which is a play on the esteemed members of the French Academy if you're wondering where that name came from.
Patrons also get to participate in the upcoming game show we're having on September 24 for the 20th anniversary of the podcast, so it's a great time to join. You can do so at Patreon.com/grammargirl. And we'll have all that information in the show notes.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Nat Hoopes; Morgan Christianson; Rebekah Sebastian; Maram Elnagheeb; Holly Hutchings; Dan Feierabend; and Steven Schapansky, whose 84-inch arm span is longer than he is tall.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
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