John Bangsund seems to have coined the phrase: “The Law of Mufree” from the “Scenes of Editing Life” column Editors’ Association Newsletteruh (March 1992). He wrote:
Mouffrey’s Law is the well-known application of Murphy’s Law to editing. Mouffrey’s Law states that (a) if you write a piece criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be some kind of flaw in your writing. (b) if the author expresses gratitude for editing or proofreading in the book, there will be a mistake in the book. (c) the stronger the emotion expressed in (a) and (b), the greater the flaw. (d) a book with editing or style issues will be internally inconsistent.
Here is one of his many examples:
Editor of the English translation Jerusalem Bible (Darton, Longman & Todd, London, 1966) did not thank the proofreaders, but did list “principal collaborators in translation and literary review,” including such notables as JRR Tolkien and James McAuley. My copy is not a mere first edition. It is a copy that passed through the printers before they stopped to correct a small mistake in Genesis 1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty, darkness was on the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.”
As an editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, proofreading hundreds of pages a year, I am particularly afraid of typos that are not caught by spell check, because even the wrong version is a real word. I have professional nightmares about economic articles discussing “public finance in the United States.”
But whenever my deep and abiding love for corrections reaches its lowest ebb, I can always find solace in these words: Ambrose Bierce Devil’s Dictionary (1906) I have presented this definition:
Proofreader, noun. A criminal who atones for making your writing nonsense and allowing the typesetter to make it unintelligible.
