How to celebrate talk like a modern pirate day. To add a sliver of commentary to that (pretty awesome) link, I sympathize with folks who wanted to rename the pirates "maritime terrorists" or "seaborne warlords" or whatever else. "Pirates" called up a certain image, and it wasn't murderous, hungry Somalis. The word "pirate" essentially went from describing something specific, comical, and lionized from the past to describing something specific, unfamiliar, and terrible in the present. The charge of the word changed almost overnight. I'm trying to think of similar examples where people had to learn to feel differently about a word within a matter of days. If only William Safire had a blog...
