I sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be accommodated with a room, received for answer that his house was full-not a bed unoccupied. Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen gathered about a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of skrimshander. Others include the familiar giddyap and now-archaic aroint. Avast is thought to come from perhaps from the Dutch houd vast, meaning “hold fast,” and is one of only a handful of what are called “ imperative verbs” in English-that is, verbs that are always used in the form of a command. If you’re a pirate captain and need one or more landlubbers to stop doing something posthaste, you have no better friend than the word avast, a nautical command to stop or cease. Benjamin Barker, Blackbeard or, The Pirate of the Roanoke. For the love of Heaven stop and take on board two helpless women, who have but just escaped from the pirates.” The captain of the Vengeance, upon going forward to see what the strange thing might be, was greatly astonished at being hailed as follows: “Ship ahoy. But while you might assume ahoy to mean “A ship!,” it really means “Hey ship!” This hoy is thought to have arisen as a natural exclamation, but a second hoy, referring to “a small usually sloop-rigged coasting ship,” entered Middle English in the 1400s from the Middle Dutch hoei. It tacks an a (as in aha) onto hoy, an older interjection used to draw attention to something or in driving animals. Ahoy has been in use at least since the mid-18th century to call out, especially to a passing ship or boat. Had Alexander Graham Bell had his way, we’d all be saying “ ahoy” rather than “hello” when answering the phone, whether receiving a call from our matey or from the dentist’s office. Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (D. But the lieutenant suppressed the man who wished to fist fight, and the tall captain, flushing at the little fanfare of the red-bearded one, was obliged to look intently at some trees. There was no reply from the bruised and battered regiment, save that one man made broadcast challenges to fist fights and the red-bearded officer walked rather near and glared in great swashbuckler style at a tall captain in the other regiment. Swashbuckler instead comes from combining a sense of the verb swash (“to act in a blustering and bullying manner”) with the noun buckler (“a small round shield held by a handle at arm’s length”). In truth, swashbuckler, which refers to “a swaggering or daring soldier or adventurer,” did not come about as a way of describing a person who buckles swash, or otherwise disturbs the water between a sandbank and the shore. Bonus: 4 parrots, since 16 and 18 together would be 34.What is swash and why buckle it? Questions every aspiring pirate must ask themselves on their own personal walk down the plank of life, to be sure. Bonus: The 3 pirates with 3 coins apiece, since they have 9 vs. Wee ones: Find the “hour” hand (the short one), then the “minute” hand (the long one). Little kids: If 4 pirates on a ship yell “Avast!” and 3 other pirates yell “Aarrghhh!”, how many pirates are talking like pirates? Bonus: Who has more treasure together: the 4 pirates who each have 2 gold coin, or the 3 pirates who each have 3 gold coins?īig kids: If each of 30 pirates trains his parrot to talk, and 1/2 of them get their parrot to say “Ahoy!”, how many parrots learn to say “Ahoy!”? Bonus: If instead, 16 of the parrots learn to say “Landlubbers!” and 18 parrots learn “Shiver me timbers!” at least how many parrots must have learned both? Wee ones: Look at a clock that has hands (not just numbers). And that was a good reason to say “Aarrghhh!” But east/west was much harder: the sun rises everywhere at some time, so how did you know how far west you’d sailed? Finally they realized that if you measured how long you’d sailed using a clock, you could figure it out. They could tell how far north they were by the height of the sun at noon. So they used the sun to figure out where they were. Back in the 1600s sailors didn’t have phones or even good maps. But let’s give them credit: pirates had to be good at math. “Sea Dog” Francis Drake was actually paid by the Queen of England to attack Spain’s ships. These bad guys dressed in crazy clothes have been around hundreds of years, capturing ships and stealing their money.
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