Exhibit A
See also: exhibita
English
WOTD – 24 June 2018
Etymology
From the conventional way of labelling the first piece of physical evidence used in a criminal trial.
Pronunciation
- (Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /ɪɡˈzɪbɪt ˌeɪ̯/, /ɛɡ-/
- (General American) IPA(key): /iɡˈzibət ˌeɪ̯/
Audio (AU) (file) - Hyphenation: Ex‧hib‧it A
Noun
Exhibit A (uncountable)
- (figuratively) The foremost example, often with a negative connotation.
- The legislature can’t fight corruption when the politicians are Exhibit A.
- 2016, Stefan Bachmann, A Drop of Night, New York, N.Y.: Greenwillow Books, →ISBN:
- Exhibit A—I had a boyfriend once. I was fifteen. He was fifteen. He had green eyes and floppy hair and liked Vampire Weekend, and if that doesn't guarantee a life of shared bliss, I don't know what does.
- 2016, John Simpson, “Marshallers of Words”, in The Word Detective: A Life in Words: From Shenanigan to Selfie, London: Little, Brown and Company, →ISBN; republished as The Word Detective: Searching or the Meaning of It All at the Oxford English Dictionary: A Memoir, New York, N.Y.: Basic Books, 2016, →ISBN, page 51:
- From 1924 onwards my little collection of evidence contained a mixture of literary references. Exhibit A was Evelyn Waugh in Vile Bodies (published in 1930): […]
- 2017 October 27, Alex McLevy, “Making a Killing: The Brief Life and Bloody Death of the Post-Scream Slasher Revival”, in The A.V. Club, archived from the original on 5 March 2018:
- Characters commenting on their own predicament as though they were the armchair jokesters of MST3K is almost never as smart as a film’s creative team thinks it is—something for which Urban Legend serves as Exhibit A.
Translations
the foremost example
Further reading
Exhibit A (disambiguation) on Wikipedia.Wikipedia