"Murphy's Law" (1955)

[Wilson Gray]

In addition to being a serious scholar of baseball, Dickson is a joker
and possibly also a smoker and a midnight toker. He's written a book
called _The Official Rules_ and one called _The Official Explanations_,
later republished together under the title, _The Official Rules and
Explanations_. This book purports to be, as its subtitle claims, "the
original guide to surviving the Electronic Age with wit, wisdom, and
laughter."

Needless to say, the book is apparently a reference work, but it's
almost totally filled with sometimes real and sometimes fake sayings,
including (pseudo)annotations, on a variety of (pseudo)scientific
topics. These sayings purport to be the rules and explanations that
account for the various permutations of the "Anti-Midas Touch":
everything you touch turns to shit.  Or, as Robert Burns put it, "The
best-laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley." The books have been
around for quite a while, having originally been published in its
separate parts in 1978 and 1980.

I thought that those who weren't already aware of who Dickson was would
first simply check his bona fides - Director-for-Life of the Murphy
Center for the Codification of Human and Organizational Law - and
immediately realize that there was bound to be some form of BS
involved.

-Wilson


On Jul 12, 2005, at 8:53 AM, Joel S. Berson wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Re: "Murphy's Law" (1955)
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
> Wilson, can you tell me more about Paul Dickson and his oeuvre, and
> explain
> the joke?
>
> I have encountered Dickson only briefly, in consulting his 1992
> Dickson's
> Word Treasury: A Connoisseur's Collection of Old and New, Weird and
> Wonderful, Useful and Outlandish Words.  There he reproduces an
> incorrect
> dating from an 1864 biography of Benjamin Franklin -- which was noted
> as
> incorrect in a 1940 article and is given correctly in more recent
> biographies and the definitive "Papers of BF."  When I saw the comments
> here on the misattribution to Beckett, I wondered about Dickson's
> general
> reliability.
>
> Joel
>
> At 7/11/2005 10:35 PM, you wrote:
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Wilson Gray <wilson.gray at RCN.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: "Murphy's Law" (1955)
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> ---------
>>
>> Can it truly be the case that I am the only one here familiar with
>> Paul
>> Dickson and his oeuvre? If so, please accept my apologies, but I
>> really
>> did think that the joke would be obvious.
>>
>> -Wilson Gray
>