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A section for all you budding etymologists where each week the origin of a word or phrase is investigated.
careless, all-thumbs mechanic who was prone to make
This week it is..... Murphy’s Law
The so-called law is usually expressed as ‘If anything such mistakes as installing a propeller backwards.”
The case for Edward A. Murphy being the source is fairly
can go wrong, it will’.
Murphy’s Law parallels two other common terms for strong, but perhaps not quite ‘beyond all reasonable
what is essentially the same pessimistic idea - Sod’s doubt’.
Law and Finagle’s Law. Of these three, Murphy’s Law Sod and Finagle certainly weren’t real people. Sod’s Law
is by far the more commonly used. The notion that ‘if isn’t known until later and the first example of it that I
anything can go wrong, it will’ is the simplest version can find is from The New Statesman, October 1970:
of a notion that has been expressed in numerous ways. “Sod’s Law... is the force in nature which causes it to rain
mostly at weekends, which makes you get flu when you
Many of these pre-date ‘Murphy’:
- Once a job is botched, any attempts to fix it make it are on holiday, and which makes the phone ring just as
you’ve got into the bath.”
worse.
This is a stronger variant of Murphy’s Law, using the
- Bread always falls buttered side down.
- Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst expletive ‘sod’ for accentuation. The term is, of course,
short for ‘sodomite’, although the word had weakened
possible time, in the worst possible way.
The list of names for the supposed phenomenon is also into a general non-sexual term of abuse by 1970 - along
arbitrarily long and, as well as the above ‘laws’, includes: the same lines of ‘bugger’.
The Fourth Law of Thermodynamics; Newton’s Fourth Finagle’s Law follows a similar pattern. Finagle has been
used in the USA, as a verb meaning ‘to obtain a result by
Law of Motion; The Inverse Midas Touch, etc, etc.
In the use of Murphy, Sod and Finagle and also the less trickery; to deceive; to wangle’. A finagler is recorded in
common Reilly’s Law, the coiners of these names seem the American Dialect Society’s Dialect Notes, 1922 as:
to have settled on a theme which calls on perceived “One who stalls until someone else pays the check”
negative allusions to the Irish. There is, in fact, nothing Soon afterwards (1926), Harold Wentworth listed it in
to link any of those names to anyone Irish, but they the American Dialect Dictionary as ‘US political cant.
The term probably had its origin in England. The
certainly sound as though there could be.
In reality, Murphy is commonly thought to be Captain English Dialect Dictionary lists the words fainaigue and
Edward A. Murphy, an American aerospace engineer, feneague - meaning ‘to cheat’.
who performed studies on deceleration for the U.S. Air The first example I have of ‘Finagle’s Law’ in print dates
Force in 1949. During the experiments, in which he had from The Indiana Gazette, April 1979, although there
a less than cordial relationship with other members are assertions that it dates from the 1940s. There’s some
of the research team, he noted that if things could be evidence to show that Finagle’s Law, while no doubt
done wrongly, they would be. In subsequent interviews, having been influenced by Murphy’s Law, is not merely
various team members have stated that they referred to the same notion under another name. Finagle’s Law is
the notion as ‘Murphy’s Law’. The expression wasn’t put more often applied specifically as a spoof version of the
into print by them at the time though and the earliest Second Law of Thermodynamics and is stated as ‘The
citation of it is in Anne Roe’s book The Making of a perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum’.
This pseudo-science background also applies to
Scientist, 1952:
‘Finagle’s Constant’ - a mythical mathematical constant
“There were a number of particularly delightful incidents. which is added to one side of an equation to obtain a
There is, for example, the physicist who introduced result when the facts don’t match the theory.
me to one of my favorite ‘laws,’ which he described as
‘Murphy’s law or the fourth law of thermodynamics’
(actually there were only three last I heard) which Is there an English phrase or saying that you would
like to know more about?
states: