Yo dude, it’s me again. Last week I was complaining about how Talk-Like-A-Pirate-Day was ruining my game of Battlefield: 1942. All my buddies were “yarrr”ing and “ahoy”ing all day -- I figured they’d get it out of their system.

No.

No, instead, talking like a pirate has become intimately linked with our Battlefield play sessions. My friends will talk perfectly normal English as we drag tables into Joe’s garage and set up the network. But as soon as we fire up the game and start browsing for servers, it begins: “Gaaarr, me buckos! Raise the gangway! Hoist the mainmast, ye sea dogs!” One time I tried to complain and they called me a “saucy lad.”

But at this point, I’ve grown used to it. For instance, “Avast! Belay yer broadsides!” means to stop firing the artillery, because someone’s about to head into the enemy base on foot. Any base at the bottom of the map is “aft,” anything to the left is “port,” anything up top is “fore,” and so on. So, “Me cutter’s weighing anchor port with an empty crow’s nest, lads!” means that someone’s leaving the west base with a tank that doesn’t have anyone in the gunner’s position yet.

Sometimes the expression doesn’t even have to really be pirate talk, so long as it sounds pirate-y. “Shiver me planksores! Me skunkers lost ye peelkeg fore o’ the maincramps!” means that we lost the flag at north base, even though it’s COMPLETE gibberish.

Anyways, the extent of our teamplay was so much so that last weekend we were ROCKING this server. The map started and immediately three of us took to the planes: “Arrr, ye gulls be airborne mateys!” someone shouted. A group of us “buckies” (assault troops) flanked either side of a pair of tanks and marched toward the base together. Things got heavy and we called in a broadsides -- I mean, an artillery strike. “Scupper that! Scupper that!” the Cap’n called out, and our airplanes obeyed and bombed an enemy tank. We marched into the base and administered the grog -- er, healing -- while the sutlers fixed the tanks. Since we’re all playing in the same room screaming pirate-talk to one another, nobody else on the server knows the secret to our intense coordination.

I guess I didn’t notice that this random stranger had joined our team from the Internet. He was standing in the middle of our base and watched as one of our gulls landed and we began scraping the barnacles. “Oy, check out the Landlubber!” me Cap’n said, pointing to the scurvy lad standing befuddled in the middle of the base. I guess he had never seen such teamwork before.

“You’re ALIENS!” he typed. “You’re all ALIENS!! You can’t be real!”

To this, we gave a hearty pirate laugh. “Make ‘im walk the plank!” the Cap’n ordered aloud. Slowly we withdrew our cutlasses and formed a circle around the guy. It was Joe’s idea to type “Kill the human... Kill the human...” as we closed in. Well, anyways, he spun around and around like a top, and then just as we got to him, he disconnected.

It gives me some kind of perverse pleasure knowing that somewhere on the Internet, there’s a guy that probably still can’t sleep at nights.