Peak and Pique
A pointy pair of tricksy twins
From time to time, Extra Muros will retrieve, refurbish, and republish a post from its back catalogue. So that you might distinguish such oldies-but-goodies from freshly founded articles, they will, from this day forward, be marked with the word ‘encore’.
Something may pique your interest. Soon thereafter, however, your interest will peak, and you will find yourself fascinated by other questions, such as the curious absence of pikes on Pike’s Peak.
Both peak and pique come to us from an old Germanic word, now lost to history, meaning ‘something with a point at the top’. (As you might expect, pike shares the same root.) However, while the ancestor of peak and pike entered the Anglosphere with Hengist, Horsa, and a lot of guys with names that ended in -wulf, pique spent many centuries in France before crossing the Channel. (The ‘q’ reminds us of this French connection.)
This leads us to the trick that will help you distinguish between the two halves of this pair of tricksy twins. It comes, marvelous to say, from a French sea shanty, in which the singer encourages a handsome sailor to ‘pique the whale’. (My favorite version of this song, which benefits from both the alloglot advantage and a well-played set of bagpipes, is the one sung by the Russian folk group Otavo Yo.)
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Kinda puts me in the mind of “pork” and “porqué” 😄