ARMCHAIR EDITORS HAVE been hard at work over at After Deadline, the New York Times blog covering usage errors, since the latest editing quiz was posted last Tuesday. The new batch of questions includes a fairly typical range of goofs and gaffes, some subtle and some not: subject-verb agreement, whom for who, a rare instance where none really must be singular.
And then there’s aggravate. A Times story had used the verb thus: “Mr. Obama aggravated powerful players in Congress and the unions that helped elect him, then moved to assuage them.” Quizmaster Philip Corbett called that a violation: “As the stylebook says, ‘aggravate’ means ‘make worse, not anger or irritate.’ ”
But as several commenters promptly noted, saying it in the Times stylebook doesn’t make it so. Aggravate has been used for four centuries to mean “annoy, irritate”; for approximately one of those centuries, usage writers vigorously opposed that usage, saying the verb’s sense should be limited to “make worse, exacerbate,” but their view never prevailed.
Aggravate, from the Latin for “make heavier” - it’s related to grave, gravity, and grieve - was first recorded as a synonym for “exasperate” in 1611. The usage apparently began spreading into print, and attracting notice, in the 19th century: The first objection, which appears in John Russell Bartlett’s 1860 “Dictionary of Americanisms,” is a brief note saying aggravate is “used improperly for maltreat, etc.”
Maximilian Schele de Vere, another student of American language, dissented in his 1871 book, “Americanisms.” No, he said, “aggravate {hellip} in the sense of irritating or ill-treating, is not an Americanism, nor used improperly.” He quoted Trollope’s “Phineas Finn”: “There would be no danger in aggravating Violet by this expression of doubt.” And Trollope was in good company; many British and American writers, especially novelists reproducing spoken language, used aggravate to mean “annoy.”
But leading the opposition was Richard Grant White, one of the most influential American usagists. In his 1870 book, “Words and their Uses,” he called aggravate meaning “irritate” a “vulgar perversion.” And as most of his fellow mavens found it more satisfying to denounce vulgar perversion than to endorse tolerance, his judgment prevailed well into the 20th century.
A funny thing happened, though, in the rush to ban the “perversion.” Most of the usage authorities neglected to mention that even in Latin, the verb aggravare had meant not just “exacerbate” but also “oppress, vex.” William Hodgson, in “Errors in the Use of English” (1881), did let that information slip, though he considered it irrelevant. The secondary sense of aggravate, he said, was “quite superfluous,” and a usage so unnecessary “cannot be defended by an appeal to the secondary meaning of aggravare, ‘to bear heavily on or annoy.’ ” (Pay no attention to that etymology behind the curtain!)
In retrospect, it seems clear that what the critics really objected to was the perceived informality of the “annoy” sense of aggravate. The usage had probably permeated spoken language, notes Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, before it spread into print; so despite its Roman ancestry, it was now “ignorant,” “careless,” or “colloquial” usage. “Women are singularly prone to misuse of this word,” wrote Ambrose Bierce in 1909. “A feminine or childish colloquialism,” H.W. Fowler called it in 1926. Webster’s Second Unabridged (1934) called it “now chiefly dialect.”
In the decades since, though, the status of the word has improved. The latest edition of the American Heritage Dictionary defends it in a usage note: “Some people claim that aggravate can only mean ‘to make worse,’ and not ‘to irritate’ {hellip} they ignore not only an English sense in use since the 17th century, but also one of the original Latin ones. Sixty-eight percent of the Usage Panel approves of its use in It’s the endless wait for luggage that aggravates me the most about air travel.”
Fears that informal aggravate would drive out the primary sense have also proven groundless; aggravate meaning “make worse” always has an inanimate object - you aggravate an injury or problem - while aggravate meaning “annoy” applies only to people or animals. The critic-approved “worsen” sense is still the dominant one in print.
But aggravate hasn’t yet won over all the skeptics. For some dictionary editors, some readers, and that remaining 32 percent of the AHD usage panel, aggravate for “annoy” is still on the informal side of the fence. Bryan Garner speaks for them, calling this aggravate an “ingrained casualism,” not suitable for formal writing, in Garner’s Modern American Usage.
That poses a larger question, of course - which newspaper writing should be “formal,” and how formal? - but it wouldn’t be unreasonable for the Times to rule that in a news story, the president of the United States shouldn’t be described as “aggravating” members of Congress. What is unreasonable is to deny that aggravate has a sense that every dictionary records. As one Web commenter said: “This is plainly a mistake.”
E-mail Jan Freeman at mailtheword@gmail.com. For past columns, go to boston.com/ideas. 
