peculate

Pronounced: PECK-yuh-late, verb

Notes: I know a related word; do you know this one?

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Yesterday’s word

The word potboiler is “a usually inferior work (as of art or literature) produced chiefly for profit

First usage

Our word came into English in the mid-1800s

Background / Comments

The reason I had a debate with myself over posting this word is that I know it; I know it from the Dorothy Sayers novel Gaudy Night with Lord Peter Wimsey (that story is the longest one and concludes the trilogy about his relationship with Harriet Vane – begun in Strong Poison and continued in Have His Carcass). Gaudy Night has a mystery, but also has a lot of introspection by Harriet Vane as well as thoughts on various topics. One such topic is the question of whether an excellent artist in hard times paint potboilers to get the money he needs to support himself and his family. Is such an action being untrue to himself or to his art? Some people find the topics and the introspection irksome; I quite enjoy it. Our word goes way back to a time when the fire on the hearth always needed to be running for cooking and/or warmth. Thus, they needed fuel to “keep the pot boiling” — when artists and writers wrote quick, cheap stuff designed to sell fast, but not containing much artistic value, critics called such works “potboilers”.