Names for variations on the principle have also been coined, usually in the context of online communication, including: 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,[2]: 22, 61 [8] and flaws such as spelling errors in a sent email will be discovered by the sender only during rereading from the "Sent" box.
[1]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.
"[2]: 357 An even earlier reference to the idea, though not phrased as an adage, appears in a 1909 book on writing by Ambrose Bierce: In neither taste nor precision is any man's practice a court of last appeal, for writers all, both great and small, are habitual sinners against the light; and their accuser is cheerfully aware that his own work will supply (as in making this book it has supplied) many 'awful examples'—his later work less abundantly, he hopes, than his earlier.
The infallible teacher is still in the forest primeval, throwing seeds to the white blackbirds.Stephen J. Dubner described learning of the existence of Muphry's law in the "Freakonomics" section of The New York Times in July 2008.
[12] In 2009, then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown hand-wrote a letter of condolence to a mother whose son had died in Afghanistan, in which he misspelled the man's surname.