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Commonly confused words: base or basis?

Are marriages made in heaven or do you have to put in a great deal of effort to make your relationship work? What is the basis of a happy marriage? Leo Tolstoy wrote:  “What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.” Problems are bound to confront you but your mutual readiness to handle both an apparently insurmountable difficulty and a minor snag will eventually bring you long-awaited harmony and you will join the ranks of happy families who are ‘all alike’, according to Tolstoy, because a happy marriage is a flawless marriage with every single problem solved and settled. The basis of a happy marriage… Can we use ‘base’ instead of ‘basis’? A language purist, who has very strong ideas about what is correct or acceptable, would say: ‘Definitely not! ‘Base’ is physical. You use ‘base’ to describe the lowest part of a column or a staircase. You can make a cocktail with a whiskey base and murderesses in crime nov