an exasperating situation

The politician talking on the radio said that something had ‘exasperated the situation’.  I thought this might have been a slip of the tongue that can easily happen in an interview so I had a look on Google, not expecting to find much.  Seven and a half million instances of ‘exasperated the situation’.  This is not a one-off.  We are in danger of losing the word exacerbate in favour of exasperate.

 Well, not quite.  A simple search on exasperated and exacerbated shows that the latter has twice the frequency of the former.  It is perhaps just that particular phrase which has become a cliché which is undergoing the transformation.

While the etymologies of the two words are quite different, there is an overlap in meaning.  The word exasperate comes from the Latin asper meaning ‘rough’, so exasperatus means ‘roughened up considerably’.  The word exacerbate comes from the Latin acerbus meaning ‘bitter’ so exacerbated means ‘embittered’  but it can just mean ‘irritated’. Her allergy was exacerbated by the pollen in the air.

There is an overlap in the meaning ‘made worse’ which makes the shift between the two possible.