I'm editing a course right now. I came across a sentence that talked about "peaked interest." Of course, I changed it immediately to "piqued," but then was interested to know if the majority of people use this correctly or incorrectly. Please review my google results:
"peaked her interest" = 455
"peaked his interest" = 965
"peaked their interest" = 857,000
"peeked her interest" = 428,000
"peeked his interest" = 342,000
"peeked their interest" = 238,000
"piqued her interest" = 27,000
"piqued his interest" = 45,300
"piqued their interest" = 18,900
This is fascinating to me, and I'm comforted to know that this should also fascinate some of my readership. Why such low numbers of "peaked interest" compared to "peeked interest"? If I had to choose between those incorrect forms, I would always choose "peaked." And why does "peaked their interest" yield more hits than any of the others? Especially when "peaked her interest" and "peaked his interest" yield such low results?
Ideas? Hypotheses? Too bad I'm not taking any more Elang classes; I could do a study.
45 comments:
I don't really have any ideas or meaningful comments.
But I also noticed recently a similar trend with "marshall law" compared to "martial law." (I was actually trying to figure out whether the preferred spelling was 'marshal' or 'marshall,' but not in that context, of course.)
maybe they're all voyeurs?
Cic, I love this stuff. Thanks for the chance to give you my thoughts on such.
My approach to understanding this phenomenon is to look at the actual chosen word, "peak" - or "peek", and tease apart why that made the most sense to the chooser. I really think it has to do with how one interprets the expression.
Perhaps for those who selected "peak", the expression "peaked interest" means mosly that one's interest is at its hightest point. A peak.
Perhaps for those who selected "peek", the expression "peeked interest" means that one's interest is more curious in nature, or their interest is secretive. So they peek.
Perhaps people who never bothered to learn the correct spelling simply select the first available form of "pique" lurking in their brains and plop it in, because they're overworked and underfed and haven't had a full 8 hours of sleep since the 4th grade.
I love how I wrote "hightest."
Mary, excellent thoughts. But how do you explain that the instances of "peaked their interest" are ONE THOUSAND TIMES the instances of "peaked his/her interest"?
Squirrel Boy? Melyngoch? This is a call for help!
This is fascinating. I have no theory but I will say that the misspelling I tend toward and my students use almost exclusively is "peak." No matter whose interest it is.
But how do you explain that the instances of "peaked their interest" are ONE THOUSAND TIMES the instances of "peaked his/her interest"?
It's possible that people are more likely to use a proper noun in the singular construction (i.e. "peaked Cicada's interest") and a pronoun in the plural construction, because it would be too clunky to name all of the parties involved (i.e. "peaked their interest" over "peaked Cicada's, Melyngoch's, Ambrosia's and Brinestone's interest").
What you really need is a search engine that will let you do a search on "peeked" and "interest" within two words, so you can get results on all phrases of type "peeked X interest." Such search engines exist, of course, but I don't know of any that are linked to a decent corpus of colloquial English.
Mary - I don't think it's quite a case of people not knowing the correct spelling of "piqued," (and picking a wrong one). Rather I think it's that they don't know the word "pique" in the first place. If they only hear the expression, and if the homonym/homophone "peak" makes a reasonable amount of sense, there's no reason to suspect that it's actually a completely separate word.
katya, you are so right. since we do more talking than reading in most cases, that makes a lot of sense.
Here's my view on the subject. First I believe that the reason you see their so much more than his/her is because of the gender neutral nature of "their." I'm not sure if it's actually proper English, but I know that I and many others use the word "their" as a singular neuter word.
The reason I believe that "peek" is more common than "peak" is simply that "peek" is more obviously phonetic. If I have to pick two vowels to make a long E sound, I would pick "ee" over "ea." Since both are valid words and the definition of "piqued" is no more related to one word than the other, we see the more phonetically obvious word being used more.
At least, that's my guess. There's really no way of knowing.
Katya,
It's an interesting thought, but for your theory of people using the pronoun "their" instead of proper nouns to be valid, then we should see a similar pattern among all the spellings. However, peaked is the only form where instances using the plural pronoun increase (and a thousand fold!). With both peeked and piqued, the instances using the plural pronoun decrease.
I whole heartedly agree that people are just unfamiliar with the word pique. I'll admit that Tolkien Boy corrected me on my incorrect use of peak only a year ago.
Master Fob:
That's the other reason that these results are so surprising to me---I would have expected more people to favor peak rather than peek, but the google evidence (taking into account only the "her" and "his" of peak) indicates that people favor peek, which I hardly expected at all!
MPB: I agree, but again, this does not explain why the instances of "their" only increase (by ONE THOUSAND TIMES---can I stress that enough?) in the use of peak. For what you're saying to be true, the instances of "their" should be increasing at roughly the same amount for all three words.
Cicada - Good point. I have to add one bit of data, though. Have you thought to combine the numbers for both "peaked/peeked/piqued their interest" and "peaked/peeked/piqued their interests"? It doesn't make a huge difference in the first two cases, but the last one got almost 43,000 hits - which is more than double the current number. (I suppose it stands to reason that those who know how to spell "piqued" would also bother to make the object agree in number with the subject.)
I think Katya may be on to something. I just Googled "peaked interest," "peeked interest," and "piqued interest" (though without quotes so that it wouldn't limit the search) and got 7,310,000, 532,000, and 2,480,000, respectively.
Try searching with all the different pronouns, too, and you'll see that the numbers generally look less wacky. It still doesn't explain the huge disparity between the results for "peaked her interest," "peaked his interest," and "peaked their interest," though. I have to admit that I'm stumped on that one.
.
This is good stuff, but I think enough has been said so I'm going off the smart end and saying that "peaked werfs interest" got three hits (all off the 100 Hour Board, of course), while "peeked werfs interest" and "piqued werfs interest" got 0 hits each.
I consider it further and conclusive proof that this silly werf thing is never going to happen.
.
"piqued werf's interest" -- 2
"peaked werf's interest" -- 5
"peeked werf's interest" -- 0
(Is it possible I don't know proper usage?)
.
I'm sorry, Cicada, (by the way) for cluttering up your blog with werfs when you left me such a poetic comment. Some repay, huh?
The British National Corpus is available at view.byu.edu. Presumably one could perform a search like the one Katya desribed to find out what the usage is in Britain. I tried, but I couldn't figure out how to, and since I was introduced to this corpus in the single worst class I had at BYU (okay, there may have been worse ones, but they weren't ones I was hoping to like), I'm not all that motivated to spend time figuring it out.
Never mind everyone, I figued it all out. "Peaked their interest" is clearly some sort of meme, which we hapless linguists are only propagating. (Maybe it's only being propagated by hapless linguists. Oooh, deep.)
Je ne comprends pas, Katya.
Moi non plus.
Oh, it's a joke, anyway. A "meme" is the intellectual equivalent of a gene - a self-propagating unit of information. In the same way that "good" genes are very successful and can make many copies of themselves, a "good" meme becomes very popular and lots of people spread it around. The internet is a particularly good place for spreading memes, because people put them on their blogs or forward them through email, etc. Blog quizzes might be a good example of a meme, because you read the results on your friend's blog, then go to take the quiz, post the results on your own blog, where someone else read it and takes the quiz, etc.
So, if the phrase "peaked their interest" were somehow embedded in a meme, then it would get spread around and used in a disproportionately high number of cases (including being thrown about on this blog). But I wasn't actually putting that idea forward as a serious explanation.
(Pourquoi est-ce qu'on parle français, tout d'un coup?)
Because I find it funny to say "I don't understand" in a foreign language.
Of course, it doesn't sound funny when I explain it (not that it was very funny to begin with).
Qs are hard, that's why.
First off, I had no idea that's how you spelled "piqued" and I graduated from BYU with an English degree...sad. Second, my BS explanation that would have gotten me a D:
Phonetically, "peeked" is the most basic way to spell the word. The more education you receive, the more you realize the English language is jacked up so you know "peeked" isn't right but would never think to use a "q" instead of a "k". And why would an "i" sound like an "e"?
So there are 3 levels of education we are dealing with at least on a spelling level: the lowest "ee", then "ea" and finally the elite with, "piqued." The disparity in the use of "their" requires a closer look into the psychosis of the middle group. Why would they use "their" so frequently? They think they are smart but secretly they are unsure of themselves. As a result, they use safe words. Words they "know" are correct but in reality are not. They just try too hard to sound smart, errr, write smart. Sadly, I think I would have been in this group. Ah, but now I know, so perhaps the elite crowd will welcome me with open arms. But alas, the spelling and grammar in this comment are probably atrocious so maybe not.
I think you need to re-check your Google results....
I ran "pique your interest" (perhaps the MOST common usage of this phrase)and its variants, and found the following:
"pique your interest" 109,000
"peak your interest" 59,400
"peek your interest" 817
Given the wide disparity from what you found using third-person pronouns and the past tense, I decided to replicate your searches*, and found the following:
"piqued his interest" 33,400
"peaked his interest" 814
"peeked his interest" 962
"piqued her interest" 19,400
"peaked her interest" 3,200
"peeked her interest" 234
"piqued their interest" 14,900
"peaked their interest" 2,090
"peeked their interest" 234
All my searches were conducted using the "moderate filtering" preference in Google.
SO...MOST people got it right, and those who mis-spelled mostly picked "peak" or "peaked," rather than "peek" or "peeked." The pronoun "his" is still something of an anomaly, but even it doesn't show the dramatic disparity in favor of "peeked" that your searches showed.
I'm not suggesting you "cooked" your data--I'm not sure why you got the numbers you did--but I just couldn't believe them, and needed to re-check. I guess that's why scientific method calls for replication of experiments.
-Doubting Thomas
oops. "peeked her interest" had 591 hit, not 234. Transcription error. Nobody's perfect, not even me....
: )
-Doubting Thomas
Doubting Thomas,
Glad to see that you're intrigued by this, too. Another thing I find interesting is that since writing this post, I have had someone find my blog every single day by googling the different spellings of "piqued interest." It kindof makes me feel good about myself. I didn't intend to become the internet's authority (I'll leave that to merriam webster); I just wanted to blog about my interesting Google findings.
I conducted all my searches again and came up with results similar to yours. Still, they didn't match yours exactly. I don't know where to change my search settings to "moderate search"; I just used the default settings. Here are the results of tonight's search, five hours after you conducted yours:
"peaked her interest" 3,250
"peaked his interest" 914
"peaked their interest" 2,120
"peeked her interest" 598
"peeked his interest" 969
"peeked their interest" 236
"piqued her interest" 20,000
"piqued his interest" 34,700
"piqued their interest" 15,100
Again, they're similar but not exact.
I can only assume that the search results are constantly fluctuating. When I conducted this search over a year ago (May 2006), I found strange results. Today, we don't find those same results. I wish that I had taken screen captures so that you could see the proof; as it is, I have no proof to offer you that on May 4, 2006, those were the yielded results.
I like today's results much better. I can understand them (though I cringed when google said, "Did you mean 'picked interest'?") and they favor the proper usage. Phew!
Rather than conclude that this article, written 16 months ago, influenced English usage and taught the entire English-speaking world to correctly use "piqued interest", I must humbly admit that search results simply fluctuate and at times produce baffling results.
Waaaaay more interesting is that you didn't think to search for "peke her interest."
This is, of course, the male the practice of sublimating their natural social tendencies towards women by purchasing a Pekingese dog to attract women to his lair.
"peke her interest" returns a single result on google -- and it happens to be for asianfanatics.net: http://asianfanatics.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=103426
It's such an excellent point, Stackedsax. My research methods leave something to be desired for sure.
Re: peaked/peeked/piqued
Let's keep beating this dead horse, shall we? I agree with M. Paul Bailey that the use of "their" to be gender neutral has happened, unfortunately, to the English language.
Did anyone think of Googling "one's interest"?
I think the reason for the lack of appearance of "piqued" is (I'm afraid) the multitudinous users of the Internet are largely young people, a product of an education system that doesn't stress phonics or spelling, use phonetic spellings and, OMG, so many acronyms and abbreviations that spelling just doesn't enter into it.
With 42,500 Google hits for "pot pori," should we be surprised?
I'm not even sure how I ended up on this site, but how fun.
Coincidentally, I just spent a week with a person who continually said things such as "it's very 'timidating'," we're just 'buying' our time," and "he made a 'skeptical' of himself." It made me wonder the same things you seem to be wondering here.
It fascinates me that those who aren't sure of a particular word don't bother to look it up or to choose another word that they do, in fact, know.
I think I learned "pique" years ago in a vocabulary lesson, but, had I not, I'd likely look up the phrase ("piqued my interest") to see where it came from and what it really meant before I actually used it in writing (or maybe even in speech).
I agree, though, that if I had to use the incorrect word, I, too, would likely choose "peak" as in "brought my attention to it's highest point" over "peek." (I am reminded suddenly of "'wet' my appetite," as if whatever it is that is whetting the appetite is causing the salivary glands to work overtime so that one's mouth is overrun with saliva.)
But I have to ask why we find ourselves discussing the usage of a term ("pique") whose usage we know for certain. Anything other than "pique" is just plain ol' bastardization of the correct word, resulting from, well, almost anything--laziness, ignorance, apathy, etc. No?
The rules of the internet are different. There is a great deal of research that shows that people do not read on the internet. They browse. All the phrases pass the spell checker. Therefore, they are correct. :)
From a recent AP article about John Smoltz:
"But when the Red Sox contingent saw him throw in Atlanta, “that’s when our interest really peaked,” Epstein said."
I mean, maybe this IS correct? The Red Sox interest had merely been piqued when they decided to fly down to Atlanta. When they saw Smoltz pitch, their interest went reached new highs and it has never been higher -- it peaked. Maybe?
hmm, an inadvertent "went" made it into my last post. Ignore.
Interesting post! :) My interest was certainly... well, you get it.
You might be interested in this entry in the Eggcorn database:
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/86/peak/
How are you? Oh, fair to Midland.
Middling
maybe...
I just found this article-- so intriguing! <> vient du mot francais, piquer, n'est-ce pas? ...it's like to PRICK one's interest
-linguist & classicist :) ...student
GREAT conversating [sic] LOL
I wonder if any of those who correctly used "pique" wrote:
"piqued there interest" or
"piqued they're interest" rather than
"piqued their interest"
PS Ended up here because I knew neither "peak" nor "peek" was the correct spelling of the word I wanted.
THANKS for your site's sight.
I was in the middle of transcribing an interview for my research job, when I heard the participant use the phrase. I typed the word "piqued" even though I wasn't *entirely* sure what it meant. So, using the trusty Microsoft Word thesaurus, I learned that it means "annoyed, irritated, urked."
Needing a bit more context, I went to Google... and landed here! What a delightful and insightful conversation. I've had my questions answered, and my interest... urked? It's just darn refreshing to find a stream of SMRTs in a sea of LOLs.
I was just trying to google the correct word usage and stumbled onto this great post. Thanks
I've never seen anything but 'pique' used in regard to interest.
My interest was piqued in 'piqued' used by an Australian writer as a two-syallable adjective meaning "pale, worn, ill-looking." The word is current in the Southern U.S., but I've always seen it spelled 'peaked.' Webster of America agrees. Can someone comment on how the words are related and whether the 'piqued' spelling prevails in Australia and perhaps Britain? Thanks, Sharron
Hi, all! I stumbled on your blog tonight for the exact reason Jan had. When I read the synonyms of piqued were annoyed, irritated, and irked, I began to doubt that was the correct usage for the word in this phrase. I almost changed the word to ‘peaked’ to more accurately describe the feeling, but I decided to run a search first. Perhaps I’ve been misinterpreting the phrasing all of these years? However, in further exploration, the thesaurus check for the word ‘pique’ in present tense shows interest, attract, intrigue, etc. All is good with the world again!
My guess is that users associate "peaked" with elevation, so "peaking" someone's interest would be increasing their interest in an item or subject.
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