Muphry’s Law of Editing and Proofreading

John Bangsund seems to have coined “Muphry’s Law” in his “Scenes of Editorial Life” column in The Society of Editors Newsletter (March 1992).

He writes:

Muphry’s Law is the editorial application of the better-known Murphy’s Law. Muphry’s Law dictates 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.

As one of his several examples:

The editor of the English translation of the Jerusalem Bible (Darton, Longman & Todd, London, 1966) does not thank his proofreader, but he does list the “principal collaborators in translation and literary review”, among them such eminent people as J.R.R. Tolkien and James McAuley. My copy is not just a first edition — it is a copy that got through before the press was stopped to correct a little mistake in Genesis, chapter 1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, and God’s siprit hovered over the water.”

As someone who proofreads hundreds of pages each year for my job as Managing Editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, I live in particular fear of the typos that are not caught by spellcheck, because the incorrect version is nonetheless an actual word. I have professional nightmares about economics articles that discuss “pubic finance in the Untied States.”

However, whenever my deep and abiding love of proofreading is at low ebb, I can always take comfort in the words of Ambrose Bierce, who in The Devil’s Dictionary (1906)offered this definition:

PROOF-READER, n. A malefactor who atones for making your writing nonsense by permitting the compositor to make it unintelligible.