Kate Leaver
TonyKArrrrggghhh Me Hearties: Seafaring Terrorists
January 11th 2009 06:11
I think it only fair that we all agree upon a new term for 'Pirate'.
Words change; meanings change... Gay has meant happy, homosexual and lame. Sick has meant unwell, unreal and awesome. Wicked has meant evil, fantastic and now just conjures a promotional image for the broadway musical.
The shift in meaning for these words hasn't caused huge semantic ripples. The misuse of the word 'gay' usually just cements a generational gap. The teen idiom 'sweet' usually just makes adults roll their eyes.
But the continued insistence of media to refer to terrorists on boats as pirates could be a wee bit more dangerous.
When I hear the word pirate, even if it's between words such as 'ransom', 'rape' and 'murder', I think Jack Sparrow. When I hear a news story about pirates, such as the current one about Somali pirates who drowned in their own rowboat after receiving more than 4 million dollars in ransom for an oil ship, I cannot take it seriously because all I can picture is a blackface version of Captain Hook sneaking around in animated glory.
Even if we refer to these nautical criminals as 'seafaring terrorists' (which is really what they are) it still doesn't seem menacing enough. Terrorist, in our Western venacular, is a word laiden with danger, fear and significance. But classify one as seafaring and all of a sudden you cannot scrap the mental image of them doing a jig, overflowing and heady beer in hand, a scarf upon their head.
I think my confusion over the term 'pirate' is entirely justified. I think my instinctive dismissal of 'pirate' crimes based on the fact that Johnny Depp has contributed more to my conception of what a pirate is than any hard-core, boat-dwelling bandit causing real-life drama ever has, is completely legitimate.
And this inner turmoil must come to an end!
The logo of the skull and cross bones, billowing on flags hoisted high on ship masts in countless movies has come to mean so much more than the anonymous stealth of "real" pirates. If authorities and media want us to take crimes committed by ship-owners, ship-dwellers and ship-raiders seriously, then they must admit that even they can't think 'pirate' without thinking 'penzance'. We should replace the term with a less Disney-tempered one and ensure that crimes are taken seriously wherever they take place; land, air or sea.
Unless news-makers and news-readers want us to secretly root for the bad guys, as one does in Peter Pan or Pirates of the Carribean, then they need to refer to these criminals as something entirely different. I recognise that the term 'pirate' originally did mean criminal, and there were some really terrifying, naughty, awful pirates. But it's about time we moved on from that definition of the word, conceded that Hook and Sparrow have taken the term over and formulate a new word to convey nautically-based vessel-raiders, riding the waves of crime and ocean at once.
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