All right, that's enough of that. But if you DIDN'T know today was ITLAP Day, here's some background.
TLAP Day is the brain(?)child of a couple of guys named John Baur and Mark Summers, who invented the holiday one day while playing racquetball. The date (9/19) has no significance aside from being the birthday of Summers' ex-wife--a date which hadn't been "claimed" by anything momentous like the attack on Pearl Harbor or Arbor Day. Although the Pirate Guys chartered the holiday in 1995, it attained (inter)national prominence when promoted by columnist Dave Barry in 2002. Since then, the sky--or at least the internet--has been the limit.
We have no quibble with the semi-celebrity status achieved by the Pirate Guys, but we think it's fascinating how this holiday has grown. We find it fascinating that TLAP Day has gone so viral that, for the most part, you don't even need to explain it anymore. Indeed, ACOS has been posting reminders of TLAP Day's approach on his Facebook page for the past several days. We picture him laying his pirate hat, eyepatch, and pegleg, out on his bed sometime last week and muttering softly as he stroked a stuffed parrot, "Soon, me pretty. 'Twill be soon. Arrrr. . . ."
In psycho-sociological terms, Talk Like a Pirate Day is a meme. A meme is essentially the cultural equivalent of a gene--or, perhaps, a virus. Just as genes are transmitted throughout a population by sexual reproduction, memes spread throughout a population by means of repetition--or maybe sexual reproduction, we're not sure. And, like that of genes, the reproductive success of memes is a function of their "coding" for desirable traits.
Thus, for example, we imagine two memes, one that "codes" for randomly killing people in the street and another that "codes" for, well, NOT randomly killing people in the street. Since the second meme would obviously be more useful for the survival of a society, that meme will become culturally dominant. Other memes, like genes, have greater or lesser degrees of reproductive success. The belief in God has been pretty successful; the belief that the world is flat had a good run until disproven by science. (Of course, the fact that some folk still believe the world is flat suggests memes cannot simply be eradicated through scientific advancement; no innoculation will be 100% successful in the elimination of a "diseased" meme.)
In our lifetime, we have seen memes come and go: neoconservatism, a fondness for disco, "Where's the beef?" Sure, we're still mimetic carriers, but that's all: These are recessive traits. They have outlived their usefulness in society. We suspect Talk Like a Pirate Day will go the same route. So enjoy the meme while you can. Matey.
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