Did you know that September 19th is International Talk Like A Pirate Day? Yes? No? Either way, here are a few reading assignments that will help you prepare by teaching you about the pirates’ vernacular, their relationship status, and among other things, their Jewish connection.

Before there was an Urban Dictionary, all you had was Well Blow Me Down: A Guys Guide to Talking Like a Pirate. Written by John “Ol’ CHumbucket” Baur and Mark “Cap’n Slappy” Summers, the founding fathers of Talk Like a Pirate Day, this book is an essential guide for anyone planning to celebrate this day with any kind of “Pirattitude.”

If Blow Me Down is an abridged version, The Pirate Primer: Mastering the Language of Swashbucklers & Rogues is the full and unabridged pirate dictionary. Weighing in at 480 pages, this tome promises to teach everything there is to know about the “world pirate language,” including pronouciation, grammar and syntax. Expect to also learn various pirate drink recipes, forms of torture, and 44 definitions of “Arrgh.”

Forget Jack Sparrow or Captain Hook. Think Moses Cohen Enriques, Sinan “the Great Jewish Pirate” and Samuel Palache. Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom–and Revenge examines the effects of the Spanish Inquisition, and the ensuing Jewish diaspora on the trade dynamics of the New World, and the role jewish sailors and financeers had in the golden age of the privateer.

Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean takes a scholarly look at the reality of life in all male society that a 17th century pirate ship presented. There is talk of burly seamen, whale blubber rubdowns, and gripping tales of adventure. So was the pirate life a safe harbor for gays facing persecution elsewhere, or did it promote a culture of pederasty and exploitation? You decide.

While the previous work is somewhat likely to appeal to a decidedly homosexual male audience, Booty: Captive Women on a Pirate Ship is written with the straight male in mind. The straight male that calls his women ‘lasses’, and prefers them powerless, and at his disposal, that is. This piece of salacious literary porn will have you daydreaming of luring your unsuspecting ladyfriend onto the lower deck of your pirate ship, pinning her against a bulkhead, and watching as she helplessly succumbs to the ebbs and flows of your murky seas. Oh, you’ll make her wish Talk Like A Pirate Day came twice a year!

Thirsting for more pirate knowledge? Here are five more books to feast your eyes on:

• Pirates Don’t Change Diapers by Melinda Long and David Shannon
• The Government Manual for New Pirates by Matthew David Brozik and Jacob Sager Weinstein
• The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Pirates by Gail Selinger and Jr., W. Thomas Smith
• The Pirate Dictionary by Terry Breverton
• How To Speak Pirate: A Treasure Chest of Seafaring Slang by Geordie Telfer