Back when I was in school, long before same-sex marriage was an issue, we studied homophones. And I remember the mnemonic devices that were suggested as aids to memorizing the difference between words like "principle" and "principal."

We were always told that the head of a school is a princiPAL because he is your pal -- which as far as I could tell, was completely false. In fact, I got that wrong on a spelling quiz by spelling the word as "principenemy."

Also, in most cases, your principal will not be a prince. Although, given how often he denies your requests, he may well be a member of the NO-bility.

Anyway, one of the principal ways I define myself is as a man of principle. But an unfortunate side effect of my adherence to principles is that I am not a man of principal.

For example, some time in the past, I was offered a writing job where I would be writing positive reviews for a service I had never used. Although it would have been useful to have a bit more income -- and faster than reviewing things by actually becoming familiar with them -- I really disliked the idea of dishonest reviews.

This was intensified by the fact that I had already started doing actual reviews, making it a cardinal sin to write a dishonest review. That would be like being a restaurant chef who decided to serve up a can of Spaghetti-O's and call it "Homemade Pasta Primavera."

Dishonest writing jobs are nothing new. A decade ago, the best place to look for writing

Advertisement
jobs was online, and by far the most commonly available writing job on the Internet job boards was to write term papers for school students. Of course, they never admitted that's what you were doing; listings always said that these papers would be used for "research," which I believe was being conducted on diverse topics ranging from "Can I buy papers off the Internet to avoid doing my own schoolwork?" to "What are the odds that I get caught cheating?" Again, the principle of the thing prevented me from taking those jobs.

Writing someone else's papers would deprive that student of the opportunity to read through mind-numbing textbooks, do cursory research and write formulaic regurgitations of what the teachers had said in class.

It would also be totally unfair to the nerds in the class, whose only compensation for athletic inferiority and low social status is that they totally get better grades than the other kids. I have to look out for my fellow nerds as a professional courtesy. And the principal of the thing -- where by "thing" I mean "school" -- would be disappointed at the use of term paper mills that devalued a child's education. And we wouldn't want that, because the principal is our pal.

Sadly, though principle was also my pal, principal wasn't. I decided my principal goal should be to unite the principal with principle, by adopting a new, principled principal principle: I would only work for principal. As some famous singer says, "It's nice to be liked, but it's better by far to get paid." After all, it's only Phair.

So when my improv troupe was asked to do a low-pay charitable show for a friend's school last month, I was hesitant. But then I realized: A school show is a show for a principal, so we went through with the performance, and I had maintained principle and principals.

Then a friend called me up last week and suggested I should do a brief performance for a non-school benefit. My immediate response was to ask about principal. But this was a fellow who had done favors for me in the past, and so I set my principal principle aside. Principles may trump principal, but princely pals trump both.

Seth Brown is the author of "Rhode Island Curiosities," the creator of GodToVerse.com and your princely pal who's fun to be with. His column appears weekly in the Transcript, and weakly on his Web site, www.RisingPun.com