Murphy's Law says this column will have a mistake in it. Parkinson's Law says it will take you as long to read this column as the time you allot to reading it. Gresham's Law says this high-quality column will be driven out of business by inferior columns. Hey, wait a minute!

So, who were Murphy, Gresham and Parkinson?

— Murphy's Law — Most experts attribute this maxim to Edward A. Murphy, a development engineer at the Wright Field Aircraft Lab in Ohio during the late 1940s. After Murphy traced the malfunction of a cockpit gauge to faulty wiring by a bumbling colleague, he supposedly said of the culprit, "If there's one way to do it wrong, he'll find it."

Soon Murphy's dyspeptic observation, usually stated as, "If anything can go wrong, it will," became the motto of pessimists everywhere.

But this seemingly set-in-stone origin story itself became a victim of Murphy's Law when astronaut John Glenn offered a different explanation in his 1962 memoir "Into Orbit."

According to Glenn, Murphy was a fictitious character in educational cartoons produced by the U.S. Navy — "a careless, all-thumbs mechanic who was prone to make such mistakes as installing a propeller backwards." Oops.

— Gresham's Law — During the 1500s, British financier Sir Thomas Gresham observed that people will hoard money of intrinsic value (gold coins), thus allowing money of less value (paper currency) to flood the market.

By extension, any inferior goods or ideas will always drive out those of higher quality. Thus, assuming for a moment that the aviation engineer origin of Murphy's Law is more authentic than John Glenn's, according to Gresham's law, Glenn's explanation will eventually supersede the engineer story.

— Parkinson's Law — British historian C. Northcote Parkinson first formulated his now famous dictum in 1955 after an exhaustive study of the British civil service, a sprawling bureaucracy that devoted most of its energy to perpetuating itself instead of getting anything done.

His conclusion: The number of workers in an organization expands regardless of the amount of work produced. Parkinson proclaimed this insight in his 1957 book "Parkinson's Law," which, I'm guessing, was bound in red tape.

His law also included this corollary: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." In other words, if I have three hours to write this column, it will take me three hours; if I have only two hours, it will take me two hours.

One hour, 58 minutes. Just made it!

Rob Kyff, a teacher and writer in West Hartford, Connecticut, invites your language sightings. His book, "Mark My Words," is available for $9.99 on Amazon.com. Send your reports of misuse and abuse, as well as examples of good writing, via email to [email protected] or by regular mail to Rob Kyff, Creators Syndicate, 737 3rd Street, Hermosa Beach, California, 90254.

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