The phrase has a birthday. After the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show ended with a singer’s costume torn open on live television, the statement that followed attributed the event to a “wardrobe malfunction.” The clothing had failed. No one had done anything. The word “malfunction” was borrowed from engineering so that a choreographed act could be described as a mechanical fault.

It entered the language immediately and stayed, which is the measure of a successful chicken. Within a year it was being used, without irony, for any clothing mishap, its origin as an excuse forgotten.

Mamet’s essay is about the small lies we tell so that we do not have to look at what we did. This one is trivial in its subject and perfect in its form: an act with two human agents, rewritten in a single phrase as an event with none.