International Talk Like a Pirate Day is arguably one of the Internet’s favorite holidays. It may be a surprise to some, though, that this parody celebration is older than social media—older even than Friendster or MySpace.
In June 1995 friends Mark Summers and John Baur were playing a game of racquetball when they randomly started chiding each other in “pirate slang” (the romanticized version of pirate speech that has grown from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and on-screen portrayals of pirates by actor Robert Newton, among other influences). The pair decided they would spend an entire day talking “like pirates” for fun.
The date of the annual celebration—September 19—is fairly arbitrary. It is the date of Summers’s ex-wife’s birthday, selected because it didn’t coincide with any other observances and because it would be easy for him to remember. The holiday was mostly celebrated among friends for several years, until it was popularized by syndicated humor columnist Dave Barry in 2002.