Take a Pique, and Your Interest Should Be Peaked Until My Page Views Peek
I had an interesting confluence of spam and grammar recently. I mean, obviously, most spam has grammar issues, generated as it is by people of low moral character and intelligence. But this one was interesting, because it commented that this blog had “peaked” the spammer’s interest (well, actually, it said that “The article has really peaks my interest”, but one problem at a time).
Now, you probably all know about Stealth Mountain, the heroic twitterbot that corrects people who tweet “sneak peak” (and is often has abuse heaped upon it for its trouble). It would be nice if there was a bot out there to correct instances of “peak” that should be “pique”, particularly because I assume this bit of comment spam was also generated by a bot, and I like the idea of bots ranging the internet correcting one another.
But correcting “pique” would be slightly more complicated, since rather than a single, often-wrong word pair you’d need to look for “piques my interest”, “piqued my interest”, “piques his interest”, etc. It is also a bit tricky since having something “peak” (as in topping out) interest works almost as well as “pique” (as in provoking, from the old French piquer, or prick). So it could be one of those borderline eggcorns that sort of backs into a meaningful usage. But then, it is hard to think of a more worthy job for advanced artificial intelligence.