I agree with everything you said. But I try and limit my zealous policing to myself, to absolutely no benefit indeed. And I can point my finger at the teachers, specially one, to blame for my orthographical traumas. I hated them and their bullshit, and maybe because of that I love linguistic variety, I usually like alternative spellings and words that can be written or pronounced in different ways. But not this one, for some reason.

Maybe, as a non-native English speaker, I learned that word more from reading than speaking (it's likely I mispronounced it mentally as gorge/gawdg the first time, or few times, I read it even), and it's a word I read and use more often than the average person. It did take a bit more effort for my brain to understand the sentence because of the spelling, so I guess it didn't like that.