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 novels make poisons with an arsenic or curare base. Your company can have its base in London but the branch offices can be scattered all over the world. Soldiers always return to their military base from the training ground. 

This staircase has its base, which is its lowest part.

If ‘base’ is mostly used about something physical, ‘basis’ is figurative. It stands for something on which something else depends, for example, your achievements form the basis for your self-esteem and the book which you have recently read can provide a basis for a lively discussion with your friends and colleagues.’

The book that you and your friends have read can provide a basis for a lively discussion.

Why is it a language purist’s opinion? Because in contemporary English there is a tendency to use ‘base’ in a figurative sense, too. For example, you can come across such sentences as ‘His arguments have a strong scientific base’ or ‘complete trust between husband and wife is the base of any successful marriage’. Yet, some experts claim that even in these examples there is a noticeable difference. For instance, if you say ‘trust is the base of a successful marriage’, the idea is that ‘trust’ is the starting point, foundation, something from which your marriage will develop and evolve. If you say ‘trust is the basis of a successful marriage’, you mean that it is the fundamental principle, something that makes your marriage work!

Trust is the basis or the base of any successful and happy relationship.

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