Troublesome Words

I have been reading through Bill Bryson's brilliant and enjoyable Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words: A Writer's Guide to Getting It Right. Here are a few examples:

koala bears is always wrong. Koalas are marsupials and have no relation to bears. Just call them koalas.

irregardless is not a real word, though one or two dictionaries do now, lamentably, acknowledge it. Make it regardless.

father, further. Insofar as the two are distinguished, father usually appears in contexts involving literal distance ("New York is farther from Sydney than London") and further in contexts involving figurative distance ("I can take this plan no further"). But there is, as OED notes, "a large intermediate class of instances in which the choice between the two forms is arbitrary."

if and when. Almost always unnecessary. Choose one or the other.

minimize, strictly speaking, does not mean merely to play down or soften. It means to reduce to an absolute minimum.

basically. The trouble with this word, basically, is that it is almost always unnecessary