Today Is...Talk Like a Pirate Day

International Talk Like a Pirate Day means only one thing, putting up with people trying out their worst West Country accents and saying things like 'Shiver me timbers', 'Ahoy, me hearties' or a simple 'Yarrr' although they probably don't realise what they are doing is speaking (badly) with a Bristol accent. 
The South West of England lent itself to piracy thanks to coves and inlets which were helpful for hiding and smuggling goods so the West Country accents became prevalent in the Golden Age of Piracy between the 1650s and 1730s.
The most famous of all pirates, Blackbeard, was from the South West as was Woodes Rogers, Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh and John Hawkins and Robert Louis Stevenson based Long John Silver on the pirates he met in Bristol taverns.
So there was a lot of West Country accents shivering their timbers all over the High Sea's but it was the actor Robert Newton who voiced many Hollywood Pirate Films in his West Country twang and it was this accent which became synonymous with pirates thereafter.
There was one South West Pirate who can be thanked for introducing many new words to the English language, William Dampier, who gave us over 1,000 words because when he wasn't raiding Spanish settlements and plundering other people's ships in South and Central America, he was writing about the flora and fauna and compiled a book and gave the language avocado, barbecue, breadfruit, cashew, chopsticks, posse, tortilla, banana, castaway, sea-breeze, subspecies, intelligence, free trade, maroon, soy sauce and kumquat. 
He may not go into the annals of history as the greatest pirate but if you find yourself today mentioning the names for the curved yellow fruit thingy or using live fire and smoke to cook food and using grabby sticks to pick up green mushy thingies, you are literally talking like a pirate.