Sod’s Law
Sod’s Law is a British term deriving from Murphy’s Law, a term for the modern proverb ‘if anything can go wrong, it will’. The proverb and law name are both attributed to George Nichols, an American engineer at the aircraft firm of Northrop in the 1940s. Apparently, he took the idea from a comment by a colleague called Murphy. Murphy’s law has also been linked to a US Navy poster campaign featuring an accident-prone character called Murphy. As well as the term Sod’s Law, there is also Finagle’s Law, an extension of Murphy’s Law meaning ‘anything that can go wrong, will – at the worst possible moment’.