Why do pirates say 'Arr'? Is it 'none is' or 'none are'?

Pirate words and origins

0:00This week we'll celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day with some fun piratey words, and then I have a quick and dirty tip about the word none. International Talk Like a Pirate Day is coming up 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

0:32portrayed as speaking a rhotic variety of English, emphasizing the R sound after vowels and saying R. Well, 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 R was used in some depictions of pirates before the 1950s, but the actor Robert Newton is largely responsible for popularizing the R sound for

1:09depicting 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 homogeneous group. There were Scottish pirates, French pirates, Spanish pirates,

1:45and so on, so you can't really say there was one specific way that pirates talked. Some may have said R, but a lot probably didn't. We don't have any recordings or many writings with pronunciation clues to help us figure it out. Now, the word pirate itself is old. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it's, quote, 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,

2:16Portuguese, Dutch, German, and Italian. Edamon Line traces it all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European word puria. Other long-used names for pirates include buccaneers and freebooters. The word buccaneer was first used to describe someone who'd drive 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 buccaneers. Some of those French hunters turned to piracy, quote, after being

2:52driven from their trade by Spanish authorities, unquote, according to Edamon Line, 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 freebooty, as in free plunder or profit, that led to the word

3:24freibouter, which meant pirate or robber, someone who goes after that freebooty. From the Dutch freibouter, 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 Spanish, who called pirates in the West Indies and Central America filibustero. The French also

3:54called pirates a name from the same origin, flibuster. 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 Edam 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

4:27gardener 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? Well, 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 wood ribs or a

5:01frame 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

5:37said 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 Caribbean and Caribbean. We have the song Caribbean Queen and the movie Pirates of the Caribbean, but also the cruise ship

6:10company Royal Caribbean. Well, the word Caribbean comes from the name of some of the people who live in the area, the carib. That would imply that Caribbean is the correct pronunciation, but that's not what I'm seeing from looking up 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, so Caribbean. I couldn't find

6:45comparable numbers for American speakers, but a 2010 book called A Course in Phonetics does concur that Caribbean is more common among British speakers and says Caribbean 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. Buckle, a science fiction author I follow on Blue Sky, who's from the region. He said that even he uses both pronunciations. For example,

7:19someone once noticed he says he's a Caribbean-born writer, but he'll say he flew down to the Caribbean. That someone speculated it's related to the part of speech, Caribbean for an adjective and Caribbean 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. So happy Talk Like a Pirate Day, whether you're imagining those pirates in the Caribbean or at the

7:50Caribbean.

Using the word none

8:00When 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. So 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

8:32noun, 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, and it often sounds more natural. I talked to the boys, and none of them are coming to the party. Now, 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

9:07to use a plural verb with the word none if it means something like no to, 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, meaning not one of them is brave, or none of them are

9:44brave, meaning 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 can be plural. And if you

A tabletop game familect

10:09weren't sure, none is is safer. Finally, I have a familect story from Anna. 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.

10:41And 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

11:14under the bed tried to add something, say like, oh, you guys should do this. And 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 add 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. And if you want to share your familect or friend-elect, instructions are in the description of this episode. Thanks also to Marlon R., who joined Grammarpalooza on Patreon

11:44this week at the Immortals level, 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 24th for the 20th anniversary of the podcast, so it's a great time to join. You can do so at patreon.com slash Grammar Girl, and we'll have all that information in the show notes too. Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Nat Hoops, Morgan Christensen, Rebecca Sebastian, Ramel McGeeb, Holly Hutchings,

12:15Dan Feyerabend, and Stephen Schepansky, whose 84-inch arm span is longer than he is tall. And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. That's all. Thanks for listening, and don't forget to like and subscribe.