In LA

People have written me today to remind me that it’s International Talk Like a Pirate Day. The most basic way to celebrate this recently-created holiday is to randomly scatter the word “arr” into one’s utterances. Arr. People here in the U.S. think this is “fun”, but they only get to do this one day a year.

One of the characteristics of the Beijing dialect is the addition of a “retroflex ‘r’” to the end of many a word. When I lived in Beijing, I liked to imagine that every day was “Talk Like a Pirate Day”, arr.

Given the fact that modern piracy is more likely to involve someone holding an RPG while shouting commands in Indonesian or Somali than anything resembling Captain Jack Sparrow and friends, and given the fact that Beijingers today say ‘arr’ more frequently than has any pirate in the history of piracy and piracy-related entertainment, I’d like to propose that this international holiday be renamed to “Talk Like a Beijinger Day”. Who’s with me? Arr.

The wonder of modern Beijing. No tilt-shift action here, just a photo taken in the Beijing Urban Planning Museum

This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 3:13 pm and is filed under Amusing, China, Chinese language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.