Peace off or I’ll show you my piece
T HERE’S an advertisement currently playing on television with English subtitles. When a smiling woman regards her spotless laundry, the subtitle informs us that the cleaning product gives her “piece of mind”. It would give me peace of mind if I could give whoever didn’t check the subtitles a piece of my mind.
It shouldn’t be difficult to remember the difference between piece and peace. A “piece” is American slang for a gun. Peace, on the other hand, is a gun-free zone. Mind you, there are armed peacekeeping forces all over the place. I’m not saying an army isn’t sometimes necessary to help keep civilians safe, but perhaps it would be more appropriate to call it a “putting-the-wrong-side-down” force. The words peace and force make an uneasy combination.
More trying than the piece-peace confusion is the frequent substitution of “peak” for “peek”. It piques me to see advertisements, the harbinger of so much error into our lives, announcing a “sneak peak” into the latest bestseller or whatever it is they want us to peek at. When you poke your nose into a hedgehog’s lair to see what it is doing, you’re peeking. When the hedgehog is too old to comb its own bristles, it may have peaked. Again it’s not difficult, yet “sneak peak” proliferates. In some circumstances it may be correct. If you’re climbing a mountain in heavy mist and you fall off the summit before realising you’ve reached it, that mountaintop might be described as a “sneak peak”. Sneaky would be better though. Those sneaky peaks, you never know when you might stumble over one. If, however, the mist clears as you’re reaching the top, giving you a glimpse of where you’re going, you might be said to have had a “sneak peek” at your destination.
A peak is also the sticking-out part of a baseball cap. Isn’t it odd how baseball caps have invaded hundreds of countries in which baseball is not played? I suppose it could have been worse. We could all be walking around in tennis shoes. Oh, hang on.
Anyway, in America a peak is sometimes called a bill, as in the protuberance on a duck’s face, which we’d call a beak. Perhaps the English term for the face-shading part of a cap was originally meant to be “beak” and someone turned the letter upside down.
Speaking of sneaky peaks and turning things around, there is a joyous scene in the TV series The Wire where a policeman asks a young detrimental where he can get “one of those caps with a bill on the side”. The youth, not realising he’s being made fun of, takes the cap off and earnestly shows it to the policeman. “No man,” he says. “You just buy one of the regular ones, with the bill in the front, and then you put it on and turn it sideways. Like this. See?”
This kind of practical instruction might be useful in the world of words. Achieving world peace is a piece of cake. You just take piece, remove the “i” and put in an “a”.
Like this: peace. See?