My Own Fit of Pique

I received a newsletter from a printer in town that contained an article purporting to give advice on naming your business. One of the items on the checklist was, “Peaks customer interest”. As you may imagine, this piqued my ire more than my interest. I’ve written before about the two words, but my mind this time took a different turn. I thought of the ways you can and generally do not use the word pique.

You might write, “Alfred stormed out in a fit of pique.” You could certainly say, “Your post piqued my interest,” and I would thank you kindly. But I would not write, “Julia piqued me,” or “The source of my pique was the neighbor’s howling dog.” Those two uses agree with the definitions of the word but seem to have fallen out of use, though GotBrainy shows it used by several writers in the past century or two. The Thomas Hardy and Edith Wharton examples in particular show that such uses were not unknown.

While my massive print dictionary promises me that you use pique as a reflexive verb in a sentence about someone takes pride in his appearance or some ability, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen it used that way. I can find no real agreement from on-line sources, particularly the venerable Merriam-Webster, except at The Free Dictionary which cites The American Heritage® Dictionary from 2000.

None of this really has much of a point, I suppose, except to celebrate the fact that there are often more and deeper meanings to words than we often realize. In the "related words" sections of various sites I came across some of my favorite words for being offended or anger, including miff and dudgeon. I must admit that I don't believe I've ever seen the latter used with out being prefaced by "high" and most places now define it as archaic except in sentences like, "Celeste slammed out of the house in high dudgeon." Clearly, that's a bit more serious than a fit of pique. I love English. It's like a box of LEGO® pieces, adaptable, evolving, and pointy at parts.