Piqued, peaked or peeked?

"It was not until the feminist movement of the 1960s/70s that public interest in "domestic violence" piqued."

wrote Alison Huggan in her letter to The Gazette (as quoted in my previous post) and she cannot have been using any of Wikipedia's uses of the word nor, presumably, did she intend it to be interpreted as a high point (peak) or a glimpse (peek).

A succinct explanation is here and so the obvious and only sensible usage (from a Google search for the word piqued) is in the definition that it means:

to stimulate (interest or curiousity) as in "you have piqued my curiosity about the man" or "my curiosity was piqued".

Note that piqued is only used in the past tense or as a past participle.

So Alison is to be congratulated on her vocabulary and on choosing an appropriate word which not many others would have even known about, albeit that she got the tense completely wrong in her usage.

The use of piqued is so obscure that several people have assured me that it was a mistake and that the correct word to use should have been peaked but they are wrong and Alison is right.

I am willing to bet that a miniscule minority of people in Cleveland would have known the usage of piqued and that even fewer would have had the confidence to use the word.

So, my hat goes off to Alison ... or does it?

Methinks this merits further investigation.