Monday, April 13, 2009

Piraculate or Piraculation


Piraculate / Piraculation: A portmanteau of piracy and (over)population. We have almost all of us recently witnessed the rather thrilling climax of the siege of the Maersk Alabama and the dramatic rescue of Captain Richard Phillips. The derivation of this/these new word(s) comes about from the development of piracy in a country-state like Somalia faced with the need of an overpopulated world feeding off of their fishing and sea territories and thus forcing them to new - and illegal - ventures. Somalia and countries like Somalia are faced with the rather grim prospect of supporting themselves without their traditional and sovereign rights to making a livelihood off of their own coastline(s) and resources. We propose piraculation is one end result of this.


Definition: The descent into or reduction to an idea, notion, philosophy, state and/or activities associated with piracy as a consequence of deresourcing and/or desimonization.

For more see the BBC Article: Attenborough warns on population . And the Wikipedia Article: Overpopulation. More on piracy, see David Cordingly's rather excellent book: "Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates". (Note: We apologize for the Amazon ad, we had wanted to use Google Books, but our public IP address provider's use of SmartFilter prevented us from doing so).
More: See the Urban Dictionarys' definition of Piracracy.

Updated/Revised: Tuesday, April 14, 2009

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