You’re reading the New York Today newsletter.  Metropolitan Diary and local reporting, plus our weekly series, Street Wars. Get it sent to your inbox.

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.

ImageLaurel MacKenzie, a linguist at N.Y.U., is knowledgeable about the history of pirate terms.

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.”

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

“Timbers was a wooden frame of a ship,” the associate 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?jili369

• Talk
• jili369
• Like
• Aargh