ARRR You Celebrating 'International Talk Like a Pirate Day'?

What started out as a joke between two friends has walked the plank of obscurity into world-wide attenion as today the world raises the Jolly Roger to celebrate the ninth annual International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

John Baur and Mark Summers, two self-described "Guys. Not men, with responsibility and suits and power ties," who back in 1995 took up playing racquet ball in an attempt to shape up. According to their story, it was June 6, 1995 when the friends, for some unknown reason, began using pirate-based terms and catchphrases to support eachother's admittedly weak racquetball skills.

"Mark suspects one of us might have been reaching for a low shot that, by pure chance, might have come off the wall at an unusually high rate of speed, and strained something best left unstrained. "Arrr!," he might have said," Baur wrote on the duo's website.

By the end of that fateful racquetball session, the men decided the only appropriate thing to do was to create a holiday for people to talk like pirates. They decided on Sept. 19, Summers' ex-wife's birthday, and "the only date he could readily recall that wasn't taken up with something like Christmas or the Super Bowl or something."

For several years, the pirate talking holiday was an inside joke between Baur and Summers' friends, until 2002, when they emailed the idea to author and syndicated columnist, Dave Barry, who incredibly responded to their email, praising the idea.

A few months later, Barry wrote about the soon-to-be phenomenon in his column in the Miami Herald, propelling the idea like a cannonball onto the unsuspecting public.

Today, nine years after the column stARRted (sorry- couldn't resist) the whole thing, International Talk Like a Pirate Day has become a cottage industry, spawning books, facebook groups, and countless television and radio appearances by Baur and Summers.

For more information on how to pirate up your day, visit the official website.