Nobody likes to be told what to do. And I’m not. This is not me saying, “Hey, idiot, you’re writing it wrong, smarten up.” No. You’re going to do what you’re going to do, and I’m fine with it. I’m collecting these here because some of you out there may actually be wondering, what exactly is this word and how does it work? Here is my best understanding.

1. whoop/whup:

To whoop is to shout exuberantly.
To whup is to hit: the Merriam-Webster website says it means “to administer a beating to, especially as punishment, [or] to defeat decisively”. (I think it’s onomatopoeic.)
So you don’t whoop someone’s ass; you whup someone’s ass.

Tangentially relevant here:
a 1993 song by Tag Team, titled “Whoomp! (There It Is)”
a 1993 song by 95 South, titled “Whoot, There It Is”
“woot”, or “w00t”, an interjection meant to convey enthusiasm (One can whoop “woot!”)

2. whale/wail/wale:

To whale can mean to go hunting whales, but also it can mean to hit something as hard as you would need to hit a whale in order to have some kind of effect on it. (Merriam-Webster again: “lash, thrash [or] to strike or hit vigorously [or] to defeat soundly”.) So if you’re beating someone up, you’re whaling on them.

To wail means to cry loudly.

“Wale” actually is a word; it’s the side of a boat. Like “gunwale”. Back to Merriam-Webster: there is an old definition of “wale” that means “to mark with welts”! Learn something every day. So if you want to say that one guy “waled on” another guy, the dictionary says you can. Now what I think is that people who spell it this way intend to say “whaled on”, but don’t know that that’s the word they want, and this meaning of “wale” is a coincidence. But what I think doesn’t matter here.

It’s not clear to me what exactly Wayne said, in the movie Wayne’s World, when he complimented Cassandra’s band Crucial Taunt. He said either “You guys whale!” or “You guys wail!” He could have meant that they kick ass, or that they sing great. Either one works.

3. yea/yay

“Yea” means yes. Like when you’re voting on a proposal you can vote “yea” (not “yay”) or “nay”. This is also the kind of “yea” you use when you’re estimating size (“about yea big”). I don’t know why.

“Yay” is the word you’re using when you cheer something. Now strictly speaking this should also be “yea”. If we’re being hardasses about it. You’re cheering by saying yes! It totally works. (There’s a Doonesbury comic from the 1970s where a boy is cheering for a policeman he knows, and it’s rendered, “Yea, Sgt. DeRosa! Yea, Sgt. DeRosa!”) But the spelling “yay” has entered the language and it’s fine to use it for the case where someone’s cheering.

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I will not be checking back with you about any of this for compliance.