Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation

by Ammon Shea

Cocoa is universally accepted in dictionaries as referring to “a powdered form of the ground cacao bean used to make chocolate,” yet it is nothing more than a poor spelling of cacao that somewhere along the line managed to be misspelled by enough people to gain legitimacy.

you would like to say that something aggravates you without running the risk of having your audience confused as to whether you intended it to mean “makes you worse,” “inflames your disease,” “accuses you,” “weighs you down,” “increases your offensiveness,” or any one of the other possibilities that the word offers, then I suggest you just go with irk—no one complains much about irk.