Origins of the Name of “Murphy’s Law”

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, I’m Mark from Richland Center, Wisconsin, and I was calling to ask about Murphy’s Law.

It’s a strange thing, Murphy’s Law. It has such a bad reputation, but maybe its reputation comes from a different moment in time when the British were trying to colonize Ireland, and the most common name in Ireland being Murphy.

So when a British constable or somebody comes onto a scene where some resistance against that colonization has been happening, the constable will say, well, who did this? And they’ll just say Murphy.

And before you know it, a whole bunch of successful resistance has happened against the British colonies or the British colonial process to the point where they’re so frustrated that they themselves called it Murphy’s Law, that if something can go wrong, it will.

But that’s just my thought process. I have no idea where Murphy’s Law came from, but being Irish myself or of Irish descent, I’d like to think that it’s proof of successful resistance.

It’s not a bad theory, but unfortunately, there’s no evidence to support that. I should say, though, that the idea with similar phrasing that everything that can go wrong will go wrong has been traced back at least to the 1860s.

But calling it Murphy’s Law, that name for that kind of idea only dates back to the 1940s. So the concept is old, but the naming of it is new. And so that’s kind of the difficulty that we have here.

And what we do know, the first use we find in print relates it to jokingly calling it one of the laws of thermodynamics. There are a bunch of researchers, amateur and professional, who hang out on the email list of the American Dialect Society.

Fred Shapiro has written a couple of great books. Stephen Goranson and Bill Mullins. They have disproven all of the common theories about the origin of Murphy’s Law as a term.

And they’ve uncovered an interview by psychologist Anne Rowe of Caltech with mathematician and physicist Howard Percy Bob Robinson, and he talks about it being maybe a mythical fourth law of thermodynamics in 1949.

Because the Irish are so hot-blooded? What is this thermodynamics? No, Irishness never comes into it. It really does nothing about Irish, just calling it Murphy’s Law.

And it never really talks about the character of the Irish, even though Murphy is an Irish name. And so sometimes, and in a second place, he phrases it as anything can happen and usually does, which isn’t a bad rephrasing of the thermodynamic law of entropy.

So it’s interesting that it might be just simply a rephrasing of the idea of entropy, that things kind of fall apart and things naturally will not hold.

Right, right. You know, one variant on Murphy’s Law was proposed back in the early 90s by an editor in Australia. And it reads in part, if you write anything criticizing, editing, or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.

And he called that Muffrey’s Law. It looks like Murphy’s, but there’s a typo. And my gosh, that’s so often the case. You commit the error, you’re criticizing yourself.

So anyway, that’s what we know about the origin of Murphy’s Law. I like your theory. The Irish certainly did not, they withstood the British dominance for many centuries. So certainly the fighting spirit is there.

Well, thank you guys. You have a great show. Thank you. Take care. Bye-bye. Be well. Bye-bye.

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