A word that occasionally irritates me is ‘technical’, and its associate ‘technically’. Specifically, their use in software engineering (and undoubtedly hardware too, and quite probably further afield than that) to describe the domain of discourse concerning itself with the way the hardware really functions and whether things you might want to do will actually work, as opposed to the various domains of discourse (‘legal’, ‘social’, ‘ethical’, ‘commercial’) revolving around how humans will react to those things.

It's certainly good to have a word for that. It's very useful to be able to describe things as ‘a technical solution to a social problem’, or ‘technically sound but ethically dubious’. I'm having a hard time thinking of any other comparably concise way to convey the same concept.

I just wish the word in question wasn't also used to mean ‘technicality’ in the sense of loopholes. Every time I describe something as ‘technically correct’, or ‘technically possible’, I get annoyed by the need to clarify ‘I mean, from a technical standpoint’, in case people thought I meant ‘only correct due to a technicality in the specification’ or ‘only possible in the strict sense of the word but not actually feasible’. I wish someone had picked a different word (for one meaning or the other).