smoking gun
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English[edit]
Etymology[edit]
Often traced back to the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Gloria Scott.[1][2]
Pronunciation[edit]
Audio (AU) (file)
Noun[edit]
smoking gun (plural smoking guns)
- (idiomatic) Evidence, particularly of a crime, that is difficult or impossible to dispute.
- We have a theory, but we haven't found a smoking gun yet.
- 1992, Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown[2], →ISBN:
- When Prophet's place in Decatur, Georgia was raided in July 1989, there was the E911 Document, a smoking gun. And there was Prophet in the hands of the Secret Service, doing his best to "explain."
- 2005 June 12, Michael Kinsley, “No Smoking Gun”, in Washington Post[4]:
- It's all over the blogosphere and Air America, the left-wing talk radio network: This is the smoking gun of the Iraq war. It is proof positive that President Bush was determined to invade Iraq the year before he did so
- 2021 June 9, Peter Beaumont, “Leading biologist dampens his ‘smoking gun’ Covid lab leak theory”, in The Guardian[5], →ISSN:
- A Nobel prize-winning US biologist, who has been widely quoted describing a “smoking gun” to support the thesis that Covid-19 was genetically modified and escaped from a Wuhan lab, has said he overstated the case.
Translations[edit]
evidence
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References[edit]
- ^ William Safire (2003 January 26) “Smoking Gun”, in The New York Times[1], →ISSN
- ^ Arthur Conan Doyle (1894) “The Adventure of the Gloria Scott”, in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, London: George Newnes, page 93: “[…] and there he lay with his head on the chart of the Atlantic, which was pinned upon the table, while the chaplain stood, with a smoking pistol in his hand, at his elbow.”