"Murphy's Law," "No Free Lunch" revisited

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

MURPHY'S LAW

22 January 1956, NEW YORK TIMES, pg. 60:
   Flight safety engineers, struggling with problems that multiply daily with
mass air transportation, quote a tenet known simply as Murphy's Law: "If
anything can go wrong, it will."

4 August 1957, NEW YORK TIMES, pg. XII:
   ...(Howard--ed.) Lindsay's Law on the subject; the only stage theorem he
respects is Murphy's Law--"In the theatre anything can go wrong; it always
does."

29 November 1959, NEW YORK TIMES, pg. 80:
   Things were fine until "Murphy's law of physics" intervened.  "Murphy's
law," explained the 31-year-old Air Force officer, who is visiting New York,
"holds that anything can go wrong will go wrong."


"NO (MORE) FREE LUNCH"
   "No free lunch" resulted in a hit from March 30, 1919, and then November
9, 1954.
   "No more free lunch" resulted in a hit on November 12, 1939, pg. 89.
William Allen West talks about his book THE CHANGING WEST: AN ECONOMIC THEORY
ABOUT OUR GOLDEN AGE.  "There were to be no more free lunches handed out over
Nature's mighty bar."

MUGWUMP
   The first "mugwump" hit is 6 June 1884, pg. 3.  The political use comes
from the NEW YORK SUN of a few days earlier.

G.O.P.
   The first hit (I'd found earlier) in THE NEW YORK TIMES, 23 November 1884,
pg. 4:
   Several huge "G.O.P.'s" were plastered over the reception room, two of
them explaining the initials to mean "Gone out of power."