8 Words the Internet Loves to Confuse With Other Words

Regimen/Regiment

A "regimen" is a routine or course of treatment for improving health, while a "regiment" is a military unit. While regiments do get a lot of exercise, that isn't their sole duty, or at least if it is, I'm going to write a sternly worded letter to my Congressman about where my taxes are going.

There has been a lot of controversy over how much college football coaches are paid, and I know there are points to be made for both sides, but when you can afford to have an entire military regiment train with you daily, that seems like it might cross a line.

This seems like dangerous advice. I have a feeling military types might be kind of prickly about being stalked.

Weary/Wary

"Wary" means cautious, you know, like the ware in "beware." "Weary," on the other hand, means tired. So this person...

...was somehow sick of blogging before she even started. But I guess she stopped being tired of it after she started, so perhaps she lives backwards through time like T.H. White's Merlyn.

Meanwhile, these teams are fucking sick of playing each other.

And this one actually makes a little bit of sense:

He might very well be weary of the Giants. My fiance (only one "e" for a man apparently) is a Philly fan living in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I've noticed he is almost homicidally tired of hearing about the Giants winning the World Series. Hey, Mike!

Ha ha! All in good fun! Moving on.

Epitaph/Epithet

An epithet is a descriptive word or phrase, and is usually used to mean a negative one, like "asshole" or "Raiders fan." News articles have to use the phrase "racial epithet" a lot to describe words they can't print in their family paper and that I can't type in this column.

An epitaph on the other hand, is something written about you when you are dead, most likely on your gravestone. When they get mixed up, racism becomes very morbid.

Pasternak, who is white, won a civil suit alleging racial discrimination. I assume he had been harassed by co-workers shouting: "Stupid polack, taken too soon" and, "Dumbass cracker touched the lives of many."

He just out of nowhere started screaming "Calvin Running Bear Higgins, beloved husband and father!" and "Janice Hungry Wolf, an inspiration to all!" at random people at the party. Kind of creepy.

Here is that cinder block:

Per Se/Per Say

"Per se" is a Latin term meaning "in itself" or "by itself." For example: "I'm not calling my neighbor a crazy cat lady because of the high number of cats she owns per se, but because her kitchen is six inches deep in cat poop and she sits on the porch with a rifle taking potshots at animal control whenever they try to visit."

"Per say," while being made of two legitimate English words, is not really a meaningful phrase, but I guess it could mean something that happens upon each "say." As a noun, "say" means an opinion, or an opportunity or turn to speak.

So these athletes:

are apparently seen by some (but not Butler) as being in a one-on-one verbal battle, where each line counts as one round of the fight. Despite his strong reliance on "yo mama" jokes, Butler feels people are familiar enough with his varied repertoire of one-liners that he won't be typecast in the future as a one-note comic.

OK, so a simple misspelling is no big deal, but even overlooking the bad spelling, it's clear most people wouldn't even know how to use "per se" if the spellchecker handed it to them corrected. Like many Latin terms, people seem to feel entitled to use it to mean whatever they need a word for, in the same ways the Smurfs use the word "smurf."

Apparently sometimes people think it means "so to speak":

And some people think it means "for example" (probably confusing it with "let's say"):

And some people think it means "exactly" or "actually":

So sure, why not. Let's just per se the term per se for whatever per se we per se. That's smurfy.

Principal/Principle

A principle is a basic truth or a guiding belief, and a principal is a dude that runs a school. These are very different things, so you'd think we could easily tell them apart, but no.

Well, of course not. If our political system was based on principals, our top issues would be "gum control", the right to skateboard on government property, and whether you have to wear a flag pin to prove you've got "spirit". Also, criminals would only have to go to jail for an hour after work. But they would have to call their parents.

It really is the basic principals that make sense to us simple folk. All those newfangled experimenting principals with their "magnet programs" and acronyms and "cooperative classroom designs" and having Jamie Oliver come in and cook healthy lunches - they are just confusing the hell out of our average American brains.

This is just mean. No matter how much you need to have your voice heard, this isn't the right way to do it.

"Principal" has some other meanings, one of which is "a sum of money." Standing on that would be a little kinder than standing on a school principal, but I think you might send some mixed messages.

Hanger/Hangar

OK, so you know what a hanger is. It is, as the name implies, something to hang things on. Like so:

So here's a really confusing news story. It starts out like this:

What? Environmental approval? Why?

Well, yeah, it's just a fucking coat hanger.

OK, that is a big coat hanger.

Obviously they meant "hangar," which is something airplanes are stored in. I guess you could store an airplane on a hanger too but it would need to be reaallllly big.

Tack/Tact

"Tact" means the ability to sense what's OK to say in a social context, like checking the racial makeup in a room before you start making minstrel jokes. A "tack" is a pin for putting posters on walls, or gear for riding horses, or - and this is where it gets mixed up with tact - a way to change direction in sailing.

A sailor who is heading straight into a kraken's mouth might try "a different tack," to steer himself toward a not-kraken's-mouth somewhere. Somehow, people everywhere keep thinking the expression is "a different tact", possibly because they think "tact" is short for "tactic," and "a different tactic" makes sense. And a lot of the time, they're trying to fix a communication problem, so the word "tact" seems like it would be connected to fixing that somehow.

And that's why you get this everywhere:

Though that's the most common mixup of these words, it's a lot more fun the other way.

I like to think this poster is asking any critics of the actress to show their manhood, and at the same time implying it will be very small.

I guess it is like some kind of secret token you have to show to be accepted on that forum.

Bare/Bear

I would never dream of insulting you by explaining the difference between bare and bear. Third graders know this. Nevertheless, people mix them up all the damn time.

Take this story on an elementary school:

That just seems really inappropriate.

That seems like a subtle threat that employees who don't strip for their bosses might get fired. That is also inappropriate.

Clearly these three athletes are so well-endowed that if they were to strip at the same time, the world's eyes would explode.

Yeah, it's hard enough to get a regular passenger to agree to a strip search, so I'm pretty sure a terrorist carrying an actual bomb would be hanging onto his clothes like a madman.

This mixup goes the other way and seems to imply that Ireland requires a certain number of bears in its government at all times.

I can understand not letting women show breasts in public, but not letting them even carry them out of the house, I mean, how would that even work? He knows they are not detachable, right?

So yeah, type safe out there, kids, or next thing you know you'll be trying to remove women's boobs or follow a regiment back to base, and that never turns out well.

For more from Chrstina, check out The 6 Biggest Badasses Who Lived As The Opposite Sex and The 6 Most Statistically Full of Shit Professions.