The other day, I got an email message from someone who uses Yahoo Mail. Messages sent from Yahoo always have a little footer advertising something about their services, usually in about 15-20 words. Just 15-20 words, carefully chosen by marketing people and probably reviewed by dozens of employees before going into production, so you'd think it would be easy to spell those words correctly.

The footer this time:

"Don't get soaked. Take a quick peak at the forecast with the Yahoo! Search weather shortcut."

I had a boss a while back who consistently wrote "take a peak" where he meant "peek" (or, more rarely, "peak one's curiosity"* instead of "pique"), and it always bothered me. But he couldn't afford a full-time copy editor. The folks at Yahoo have no excuse.

(*) At least the example of "peak one's curiosity" could be construed to convey the same meaning, if you take the alternate transitive verb meaning "to cause to come to a peak, point, or maximum". The "take a peak" expression is still just plain wrong, unless you actually mean that someone should steal the summit from something. And even then you'd say "from" instead of "at".