Muphry's Law

Muphry's Law has been identified as "the editorial application of the better-known Murphy's Law".

It consists of four rules:
(a) if you write anything criticising 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.

A similar law is McKean's Law which states: "Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error"

What these laws are saying is that one must be very careful when criticising or editing an others work.

I fell victim to these laws at Mel and Greedies last week.

What started out as just a quiet drink and jam session quickly dissolved into a night of debauchery fuelled by drink, drugs, beautiful women and great live music.

I think I kept my clothes on, not sure...

While talking to the wonderful Sarah Toa I pointed out that she had spelled the same word three different ways in a recent blog post.

At least I tried to point it out to her.

What I gave her was a speech peppered with punctuation, tense and spelling mistakes and massive amounts of dribbling and slurring.

A clear case of a verbal Muphry.

Sarah, to her credit, took it quite well.