“Aggravate for Irritate. ‘He aggravated me by his insolence.’ To aggravate is to augment the disagreeableness of something already disagreeable, or the badness of something bad. But a person cannot be aggravated. Even if disagreeable or bad. Women are singularly prone to misuse of this word.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
