Muphry's law is an adage that states: "If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written." The name is a deliberate misspelling of Murphy's law.
Contents
Similar laws have also been coined, usually in the context of online communication, under names including Umhoefer's Rule (or Umhöfer's Rule), Skitt's Law, Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation (or The Law of Prescriptive Retaliation), The Iron Law of Nitpicking, McKean's Law, and Bell's First Law of USENET. Further variations state that flaws in a printed or published work will only be discovered after it is printed and not during proofreading, and flaws such as spelling errors in a sent email will be discovered by the sender only during rereading from the "Sent" box.
History
John Bangsund of the Society of Editors (Victoria) in Australia identified Muphry's law as "the editorial application of the better-known Murphy's law" and set it down in 1992 in the Society of Editors Newsletter.
The law, as set out by Bangsund, states that:
(a) if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written;
(b) if an author thanks you in a book for your editing or proofreading, there will be mistakes in the book;
(c) the stronger the sentiment expressed in (a) and (b), the greater the fault;
(d) any book devoted to editing or style will be internally inconsistent.
It goes on to say:
Muphry's Law also dictates that, if a mistake is as plain as the nose on your face, everyone can see it but you. Your readers will always notice errors in a title, in headings, in the first paragraph of anything, and in the top lines of a new page. These are the very places where authors, editors and proofreaders are most likely to make mistakes.
Bangsund's formulation was not the first to express the general sentiment that editorial criticism or advice usually contains writing errors of its own. In 1989, Paul Dickson credited editor Joseph A. Umhoefer with the adage, "Articles on writing are themselves badly written", and quoted a correspondent who observed that Umhoefer "was probably the first to phrase it so publicly; however, many others must have thought of it long ago." An even earlier reference to the idea, though not phrased as an adage, appears in a 1909 book on writing by Ambrose Bierce:
In neither taste nor precision is any man's practice a court of last appeal, for writers all, both great and small, are habitual sinners against the light; and their accuser is cheerfully aware that his own work will supply (as in making this book it has supplied) many "awful examples". (Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults 1909)
Examples
Stephen J. Dubner described learning of the existence of Muphry's law in the Freakonomics section of The New York Times in July 2008. He had accused The Economist of a typo in referring to Cornish pasties being on sale in Mexico, assuming that "pastries" had been intended and being familiar only with the word "pasties" with the meaning of nipple coverings. A reader had alerted him to the existence of the law, and The Economist had responded by sending Dubner a Cornish pasty.
In 2009, the then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown hand-wrote a letter of condolence to a mother whose son had died in Afghanistan, in which he misspelled the deceased's surname. The Sun (a tabloid newspaper) published a vitriolic article criticising his lack of care. In this article, the paper misspelled the same name and was forced to publish an apology of its own.