Talk:Smoking gun

2007-02-9 Automated pywikipediabot message
--CopyToWiktionaryBot 07:45, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Gesture?
Doesn't the term "smoking gun" also exist as a gesture? When you blow across the tip of your finger, to signify doing something with style, isn't that a smoking gun, too? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.106.19.89 (talk) 03:01, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

``````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````` I thought, too, that there was a mystery story in which the person found holding the smoking gun was not the one who shot it, making the item anything but incontrovertible proof. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 1Bower2Birdn (talk • contribs) 01:37, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Cite
The introduction to the article should include citation(s). Also, the remainder of the article consists almost entirely of one quote. To create a more balanced article, more material and more citations should be added.--Solomonfromfinland (talk) 05:33, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Copyright violation
Prior content in this article duplicated one or more previously published sources. The material was copied from: ihttp://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/26/magazine/the-way-we-live-now-1-26-03-on-language-smoking-gun.html. Copied or closely paraphrased material has been rewritten or removed and must not be restored, unless it is duly released under a compatible license. (For more information, please see "using copyrighted works from others" if you are not the copyright holder of this material, or "donating copyrighted materials" if you are.) For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or published material; such additions will be deleted. Contributors may use copyrighted publications as a source of information, and according to fair use may copy sentences and phrases, provided they are included in quotation marks and referenced properly. The material may also be rewritten, but only if it does not infringe on the copyright of the original or plagiarize from that source. Therefore such paraphrased portions must provide their source. Please see our guideline on non-free text for how to properly implement limited quotations of copyrighted text. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. While we appreciate contributions, we must require all contributors to understand and comply with these policies. Thank you. Neonorange (talk) 04:09, 27 June 2014 (UTC) All content following the lede and the initial sentence is a copyright violation. - Neonorange (talk) 04:09, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

When did this arise as a metaphor?
The article suggested that Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Gloria Scott was the first to use "smoking gun" as a metaphor for evidence of clear guilt. It wasn't. Conan Doyle's use was not metaphorical: the character literally had a smoking gun (actually "a smoking pistol"), and the cited reference does not suggest otherwise.

This leaves open when it was first used as a metaphor for clear and convincing evidence of obvious guilt.

The OED's first such citation is a 1974 New Yorker article, with the sentence "Some are still searching for what has come to be termed 'the murder weapon'—or 'the smoking gun'—the definitive piece of evidence that the President committed a crime." But it does not assert that this is the first such metaphorical usage, and I suspect the usage predates 1974 by quite a bit. TJRC (talk) 22:17, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not a dictionary
This article should be deleted. Kotika98 (talk) 20:43, 5 July 2023 (UTC)