Definition
: a slight offense
Examples
Mark’s thank-you note to his hostess was sincere and touching; his only peccadillo was addressing her by her first name instead of “Mrs. Henderson.”
“[Tanyanne] Ball seemed to have mastered the form of affable confrontation: as soon as she saw someone perpetrating a civic peccadillo, she would stride up and calmly, grinningly ask, ‘Are you aware that you have just committed a violation?'” — Tobi Haslett, NewYorker.com, 10 Nov. 2015
Did You Know?
“The world loves a spice of wickedness.” That observation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow may explain why people are so willing to forgive peccadilloes as youthful foolishness or lapses of judgment. The willingness to overlook petty faults and minor offenses existed long before English speakers borrowed a modified version of the Spanish pecadillo at the end of the 16th century. Spanish speakers distinguished the pecadillo, or “little sin,” from the more serious pecado, their term for a sin of magnitude. And these Spanish terms can be traced back still further, to the Latin verb peccare, meaning “to sin.”
How my heart sings 
We seem to be in a strange phase of total hypocrisy, where, on the one hand, we deplore ‘trivialising’ sexual matters and, on the other, newspapers, and the media in general, know that ‘sex sells’, so are full of titillation. Even ‘War and Peace’ has to be ‘sexed up’ 🙂
Actually I was thinking just that last night.Something wrong somewhere.Real love seems trivialised too,
I think this is a word I have usually encountered in a sexual context – it is sometimes used to trivialise situations that are actually more serious. So, one might read of a teacher’s peccadillos for his students, and so on. We are slowly realising that behaviour that was regarded as ‘a bit of a giggle’ a few years ago can have more serious consequences.
Yes,I am just reading Iris Murdoch’s life.She claimed to enjoy being pawed by her tutor…. perhaps in that era it was the best way to deal with it.Or maybe she did like it.We are all different and sometimes what one woman likes another will be shocked by,which makes it harder for men.But it is a bit ironical how things change.We were probably more innocent at 18 than 12 year olds are now.But it’s better now without all the fear and shame that was laid on gitls who got pregnant.