Meaning of object lesson | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A lesson taught (especially to young children) using a familiar or unusual object as a focus.
2. An example from real life that explains a principle or teaches a lesson.
3. Anything used as an example or lesson which serves to warn others as to the outcomes that result from a particular action or behavior, as exemplified by the fates of those who followed that course.

Equivalents

Examples

“Vertebrates are limited to two eyes each, but the variations they have played on this plain vanilla starting point are an object lesson in how much can be made from a little.”

“Let that be an object lesson to him.”

“Of the announcement, Osborne said: "They have spent a hundred billion pounds of public money and they've got a massive raspberry from everyone as far as I can see. As a PR exercise, it's been an object lesson in how not to make a government announcement."”

“Yet China, like Russia, is now giving us an object lesson in the usefulness of having an open society, where strongmen don’t get to invent their own reality.”

“The U.K. is now an object lesson for other countries dealing with a dark triad of deindustrialization, degrowth, and denigration of foreigners.”

“Thames Water has become the latest object lesson in the predictable and predicted folly of privatised monopolies, aided by a regulator that’s an even bigger wet wipe than the fatbergs bunging up the sewers.”

CEFR level