[Ads-l] "proof of life" (1981)

[dave@wilton.net]

Not in the OED.
 
Wenner, Christopher. “Kidnaping Is Old Weapon, and Perhaps the Cruelest.” Miami Herald (Florida), 14 June 1981, 5D/4. Newspapers.com.

“Doing everything the gang asks does not guarantee anything, however. Salvadorean industrialist and financier Luis Poma arranged the release of three senior guerrilla leaders and paid a large ransom but got only directions to the body of his son, Roberto, cemented over in a cellar.

“He had not asked for ‘proof of life’—the answer to an intimate question, for example—before paying the money-makers of the Salvadorean left, the FARN.”
 
The phrase was catapulted in the mainstream by the 2000 Taylor Hackford film “Proof of Life,” starring Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe.
 

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