Quote Originally Posted by Hanna View Post
I have never paid too much attention to your English but "piqued my curiosity" is rather elegant English, and it's something only an educated person would say. Might well be British rather than American. I know the expression but I wouldn't have used it. I would probably just said "I got curious" or something like that.
Hanna, allow me to disagree, a little bit! In my experience, a great many not-very-elegant speakers of English, on both sides of the Atlantic, are able to SPEAK the phrase "пикт май кьюриосити" (using Cyrillic transcription because I don't know the proper IPA characters!). But on both sides of the Atlantic, people who are less educated will use the written spelling "peaked my curiosity" or "peeked my curiosity" -- when, as you know, the correct spelling is "piqued." (If I'm not mistaken, the word originally meant something like "колоть иголкой")

Just to re-emphasize the point: the SPOKEN phrase will sometimes be heard even at lower levels of education, in both the US and the UK -- but in all dialects of English, it's relatively rare to find someone who knows the correct spelling -- even well-educated people often use the spelling "peaked."