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=                               Muphry                               =
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                            Introduction
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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".


                              History
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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 March 1992 in the
'Society of Editors Newsletter' in his column "John Bangsund's
Threepenny Planet".

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.

In November 2003, the 'Canberra Editor' added the following
elaboration:

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:


                              Examples
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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, then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown (who is blind in one
eye) hand-wrote a letter of condolence to a mother whose son had died
in Afghanistan, in which he misspelled the man's surname. 'The Sun' (a
tabloid newspaper) published an article criticising his lack of care.
However, in the article, the paper also misspelled the same name and
was forced to publish an apology of its own.


                             Variations
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Names for variations on the principle have also been coined, usually
in the context of online communication, including:

* Umhoefer's or Umhöfer's rule: "Articles on writing are themselves
badly written." Named after editor Joseph A. Umhoefer.
* Skitt's law: "Any post correcting an error in another post will
contain at least one error itself." Named after Skitt, a contributor
to alt.usage.english on Usenet.
* Hartman's law of prescriptivist retaliation: "Any article or
statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to
contain at least one ." Named after editor and writer Jed Hartman.
* The iron law of nitpicking: "You are never more likely to make a
grammatical error than when correcting someone else's grammar." Coined
by blogger Zeno.
* McKean's law: "Any correction of the speech or writing of others
will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical
error." Named after editor Erin McKean.
* Bell's first law of Usenet: "Flames of spelling and/or grammar will
have spelling and/or grammatical errors." Named after Andrew Bell, a
contributor to alt.sex on Usenet.

Further variations state that flaws in a printed ("Clark's document
law") or published work ("Barker's proof") 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.


                           External links
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* Breaking Muphry's Law, by Mark Nichol.
[http://www.dailywritingtips.com/breaking-muphrys-law/ Daily Writing
Tips]
* Now presenting… Muphry's Law, by Ben Zimmer.
[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=386 Language Log]


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