09.21.08
Rated Arrr! for . . . well, for the hell of it, actually
Already, the grog hangovers from celebrating International Talk Like a Pirate Day (TLAPD) a couple of days back are threatening to subside in the next week or two. Had we only eaten before such drinking—had we only partaken of the traditional buccaneer feast that I hinted at in yesterday’s post before imbibing, we might be less hung over, and a little pleasantly fatter, as well.
I propose that the traditional feast for TLAPD involves initials of a sort itself: BBQ. Here’s why, in the vein of my Unfortunate English: The Gloomy Truth Behind the Words You Use
Which of the following is most notorious in the world of piracy: The pirate Blackbeard? Or the buccaneer Redmeat?
Redmeat is neither pirate nor buccaneer, of course. I’m referring to the artery-clogging red meat, the eating of which is in some circles both politically and gastronically incorrect. Before Blackbeard was spilling the blood of his victims from 1713 to 1718, the buccaneers were spilling the blood of wild red-meat oxen and wild the-other-white-meat boars in the Caribbean. And dining well. Caribbean natives used wood (and later metal) frameworks for various purposes, among them sleeping (to avoid snakes) and curing and roasting meat. Speakers of the native Carribbean language Tupi called such a framework a mukem. French explorers adapted the word as boucan, and people who used them to cook on were boucaniers. (Native Haitians used similar frameworks, which in the language Taino were called babricots. The Spanish adopted this word as barbacoa, which led to our word barbecue.)
The boucaniers moved from redmeatish pursuits to Blackbeardish pursuits, and were known by the late 1600s in English as buccaneers. Did they consult their food pyramids before all that pillaging?
For more information on the source of the word barbecue that will hurt your head even more than a grog hangover, consult my previous post on the topic, matey.
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