smoking gun

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English

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Etymology

Often traced back to the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Gloria Scott.

Pronunciation

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Noun

smoking gun (plural smoking guns)

  1. (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, →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."
    • 2003 January 9, Hans Blix, “Notes for Briefing the Security Council”, in UNMOVIC‎:
      I now turn to the role and results of our current inspections. Evidently if we had found any ‘smoking gun’ we would have reported it to the Council.
    • 2005 June 12, Michael Kinsley, “No Smoking Gun”, in Washington Post‎:
      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, →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

References

  1. ^ William Safire (2003 January 26) “Smoking Gun”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN
  2. ^ 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.”
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