Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll find out how New York University is taking note of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, which is today. We’ll also get details on a new sexual assault charge that was filed against the disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein.
To capitalize on International Talk Like a Pirate Day, a stunt that attracts attention on social media, New York University has prepared “Pirate Lingo 101.”
It features an associate professor of linguistics, but it is not a for-credit course. It is not a course at all. It is a video that features two fast-moving minutes about the origins of phrases like “arrgh” and “shiver me timbers.”
“Timbers was a wooden frame of a ship,” the assistant professor, Laurel MacKenzie, explains in the video, “and shiver meant to break into splinters.” So when someone said “shiver me timbers,” it conveyed surprise, as if a gale “suddenly blew their ship to smithereens.”
And nautical terms like “ahoy” and “matey” that swashbuckling seafarers like Blackbeard would have used in everyday conversation?
“‘Ahoy’ is a way of getting someone’s attention, and ‘matey’ means a friend or just another person,” MacKenzie said.
For the video, MacKenzie dressed differently from the way she does when she is teaching. She put on a pirate’s hat like the ones seen in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies. She also did research into “piratisms,” consulting the Oxford English Dictionary, “our definitive resource of the history of the English language.”
The phrases she found dated to the mid- to late 18th century. Pirates, she said, were not really that likable. “Nowadays we think of them as lovable rogues, but they were probably pretty awful,” she said. “I wonder if that’s why we don’t see the O.E.D. citing piratisms until 100 years after the golden age of piracy.”
Another reason might be that piratisms probably were not put on paper until fiction writers “wrote novels with pirates in them, so they needed pirate dialogue.”
Or they wrote a novel with a pirate right in the title, as in “The Pirate” by Sir Walter Scott, published in the 1820s. Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” came along 60 years later.
The Hollywood version in 1950 “virtually created the downscale pirate captain,” William Grimes wrote in The New York Times. And MacKenzie said that Robert Newton, the actor who played Long John Silver (and also Blackbeard) was right for the role. “He was from the West Country in southwest England, where many pirates would have come from,” MacKenzie said. “He played the part in a broad stereotypical West Country accent that has become the canonical image of a pirate today.”
Not all pirates talked like Newton, of course. MacKenzie noted that “pirates would have been from all over the world,” a point echoed by the historian Peter Earle, who said that the pirates in Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” plied the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico from the 1650s to the 1720s. They were, he wrote, “virtually the only pirates in history to exhibit those characteristics which we expect ‘real’ pirates to have.”
International Talk Like a Pirate Day dates to the 1990s. It was the creation of two friends from Oregon, John Baur and Mark Summers, who were playing racquetball “when, for reasons that aren’t clear to either of them now, they started insulting each other in pirate jargon,” according to their website. They settled on Sept. 19 as a day to celebrate it.
As for MacKenzie, she is on sabbatical this year but agreed to appear in the video as a favor to a friend.
She said she had not seen the video. So — spoiler alert — she did not know that a parrot-like bird lands on her shoulder, thanks to postproduction computer-generated graphics.
“Thank God I’m on sabbatical, and I don’t have to see any students,” she said. “I can hide under a rock for a week until this blows over.”
Weather
Expect cloudy skies and a chance of showers in the afternoon, with temperatures in the upper 70s. For tonight, showers may continue, with temperatures as low as 66.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Oct. 3 (Rosh Hashana).
The latest Metro news
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Subway funding in question: Transit leaders proposed a $65 billion, five-year plan to upgrade New York City’s subway and bus system. Whether they will be able to fully fund it is unclear.
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Criticism grows over subway shooting: A friend of Gregory Delpeche, one of two bystanders shot by police officers on Sunday during a confrontation in a subway station, decried the use of guns in a crowded station.
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Trump on Long Island: Donald Trump’s rally in Nassau County on Wednesday is another sign of the area’s shift to the right, but some question his choice to spend time in a non-battleground state.
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A major project in Newark: Construction is about to begin on a $336 million project next to the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark with new apartments, retail space and a huge community center.
Harvey Weinstein faces a new sexual assault charge
Prosecutors said last week that a new indictment against the disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein would remain sealed until the day Weinstein was well enough to go to court. That day was Wednesday.
Weinstein, who had emergency heart surgery on Sept. 8, pleaded not guilty to the new charge, which accuses him of sexually assaulting a woman in a Manhattan hotel in 2006. Prosecutors also plan to retry an earlier case earlier case against Weinstein. He was convicted in 2020, but the verdict was overturned by the state’s highest court in April.
The new charge is the latest legal trouble for a man who faced accusations that set off the #MeToo movement. Weinstein has also been convicted in California on sex charges and faces a prison term there.
The new charge accuses Weinstein of engaging forcibly “in oral sexual conduct” with someone who was not identified. On Wednesday, Weinstein, 72, arrived in court in a wheelchair and took his place next to his lawyers. He was wearing dark-rimmed glasses and a dark suit and had a bandage on one hand.
The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, issued a statement thanking the “survivor who bravely came forward.” Lindsay Goldbrum, a lawyer who said she represented the woman, said that her client did not want to be identified right now. But Goldbrum added that the woman “will be fully prepared to speak her truth at trial to hold Mr. Weinstein accountable before a jury of his peers.”
Arthur Aidala, a lawyer for Weinstein, had accused prosecutors of using “delay tactics” to stall a new trial. “They have a defendant, and now they’re out there looking for a crime,” he said during an earlier hearing.
Jessica Mann, the actress who testified during the 2020 trial, said in a statement last week that the new charges showed that the grand jury that handed up the indictment, “like so many others, can see clearly through his facade for what he truly is: a predator who must be held accountable for his crimes.”
Justice Curtis Farber of State Supreme Court, who is presiding over the case, had set Nov. 12 as the tentative date for the retrial. Shannon Lucey, a prosecutor, said in court on Wednesday that the district attorney’s office had filed a motion to consolidate the retrial and the proceeding involving the new charge. Separate trials, she said, would be “burdensome.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Zippy Ride
Dear Diary:
It was summer 2014, and I was in my 20s. I was subletting a tiny, windowless bedroom in South Williamsburg.
One August morning, the heat was so oppressive in that little room that I left the shift dress I was wearing unzipped as I got ready for work, intending to zip up right before leaving.
The commute into Manhattan for what was my first real 9-to-5 job included a 20-minute walk to the Bedford Avenue L station. I was always drenched with sweat by the time I got there.
When the train finally pulled in that morning, riders were packed in like sardines. I squeezed my way into a car, and we rumbled off through the tunnel.
“Excuse me,” I heard a man behind me say.
The car was too crowded for me to turn around to face him, but I glanced over my shoulder to see that he was about my age.
“Your dress is unzipped,” he said.
My cheeks, already flushed from the heat, got redder as I blushed in embarrassment. I tried to reach behind me, but I couldn’t grasp the zipper.
“Do you want me to …?” he asked tentatively.
“Oh, yes. If you don’t mind,” I said. “Thank you.”
He zipped me up, and we rode silently the rest of the way into Manhattan.
— Katie Bucaccio
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Steven Moity, Hurubie Meko and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post Aargh, It’s Talk Like a Pirate Day appeared first on New York Times.
