Is Your Appetite Wetted or Your Curiosity Peaked?

It's becoming fairly common to find people using the expression "wet your appetite."  Folks, the idiom is to WHET your appetite . . . that is, to sharpen it. Apparently the word "whet" has fallen so far out of common use that people no longer recognize it when they hear it.  I've even heard people remark that they thought a whetstone was called a "wet stone" because you run water over it when you are sharpening knives!

A similarly misunderstood phrase that I'm occasionally starting to see in writing is "peaking your curiosity." This seems logical, since "peaking" someone's curiosity could mean trying to heighten or raise it. However, once again, this represents the hijacking of an idiom, and the proper word to use in this expression is actually not "peak," but "pique." According to Merriam-Webster, this is from the French piquer-- literally, to prick.