buccaneer

Your neighbour invites you to a barbecue on a Sunday afternoon and you gladly accept. You turn up on the day and the door opens. There’s your neighbour with the parrot on the shoulder, the patch over the eye, the wooden leg and the full costume, saying “avast there, me hearties, ‘tis a great day to be on the high seas, Jim lad. Arr, so it is! Splice the main brace and...” oh, well, you get the idea. But it’s entirely understandable. In the 17th century, a boucan was a barbecue, and a buccaneer was a hunter, who then dried and smoked the meat he caught on the boucan. The Spanish used French settlers to hunt wild oxen for their meat. When the Spanish authorities drove them out of business, they turned to hunting treasure from ships on the high seas, hence the meaning we use now.