Sept. 19, as you probably already know, is Talk Like a Pirate Day. This holiday – known as TLPD to all true jack tars – got its start in 1995. That year, two Oregon guys (you knew it had to be guys, didn’t you?), John Baur and Mark Summers, were goofing around on the racquetball court and started to talk to each other like buccaneers. Example: “Avast, ye son of a sea biscuit – belay the bilge water and serve the ball, yarr, afore I give ye a taste o’ cold steel, yarr.” (Apparently, union rules require pirates to say “yarr” a lot).

Of course, this kind of talk on a racquetball court is all in jest since racquetball rules, as standardized by the International Racquetball Association in London in 1972, clearly prohibit the use of weapons.

Anyway, Baur and Summers had a lot of fun talking like pirates and decided that what the world needed was yet another holiday. Thus TLPD was born. They set the holiday for Sept. 19, which was apropos of not much except that it happened to be Baur’s ex-wife’s birthday. Plus, it wasn’t already a holiday.

For the next seven years, Baur, Summers and a few friends marked Talk Like a Pirate Day quietly. And their exclusive little holiday might have continued in relative anonymity had Baur not stumbled upon the e-mail address of some humor columnist named Dave Barry. Barry ended up writing a column about TLPD and the rest is more or less history. Baur and Summers have been interviewed by newspapers and radio stations in locales as far-flung as Ireland and Australia, and TLPD is now celebrated by tens of people around the world.

The reason I bring this up is that I think George Bush should talk like a pirate – and not just on Sept. 19. No, I think he should talk like a pirate all the time.

Let’s be frank – Bush isn’t known for his rhetorical chops. In fact, he’s famous for his malapropisms. A perfect illustration happened just last week in Australia. Bush was in Sydney for a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. Of course, that group’s name is abbreviated APEC. And, of course, when Australian Prime Minister John Howard introduced him, George referred to the group as OPEC.

The group howled with laughter, and Bush tried to recover by saying, “He [Howard] invited me to the OPEC summit next year." For the record, Australia is not and never has been a member of OPEC.

But imagine if he had been following my advice. He could have played off what was an understandable fumble and at the same time gotten a big laugh out of it. “Yarr, ye scurvy dogs – I must have been thinkin’ o’ that classic Gershwin line: ‘To-may-to, to-mah-to; APEC, OPEC – let’s call the whole thing off.’ And belay the laughs, lest I keel-haul the lot of ye.”

Who knows? If Bush were to listen to me, he could be remembered as a Long John Silver-tongued orator.

Yarr!