The origin of the “Elephant in the Room” and how to use it

Sometimes, when English speakers want to talk about something nobody really wants to talk about, like a problem or awkward situation, they refer to ‘The elephant in the room’.

Chances are that if you’ve been learning English for a while you’ve probably heard of this idiomatic expression…

The question is: Where did it actually come from?

Even though there are many theories and the exact origin is rather uncertain, there’s one that we’ve found quite credible.

In 1814, Ivan Andreevich Krylov (1769-1844), poet and fabulist, wrote a fable entitled “The Inquisitive Man” which tells of a man who goes to a museum and notices all sorts of tiny things, but fails to notice an elephant. Suddenly the phrase became proverbial, as this metaphorical expression describes perfectly when in many cases some people refuse to talk about an obvious problem.

Fyodor Dostoevsky in his novel ‘Demons’ wrote, ‘Belinsky was just like Krylov’s Inquisitive Man, who didn’t notice the elephant in the museum.

Wikipedia states that the Oxford English Dictionary credits the New York Times newspaper from June 20th, 1959, as the first recorded use of this phrase as a simile. There is supposedly a line from it that reads:

“Financing schools has become a problem about equal to having an elephant in the living room. It’s so big you just can’t ignore it.”

Now that you know the possible origin of this idiom…

When should you use it?

As we’ve already explained, you can use this expression whenever there’s an important and obvious topic, which everyone present is aware of, but which isn’t discussed, as such discussion is considered to be uncomfortable.

Let’s suppose:

We are colleagues working for the same company, and the sellings have been so bad lately that the company is going into bankruptcy. This exact problem would be ‘the elephant in the room’. So whenever we wanna talk to our other colleagues about this problem (instead of saying that everything is going to hell!) we would say: “We still haven’t had that important meeting with our boss about the elephant in the room”. Get it?

Here are some bonus examples for you:

Example 1: “The fact that his 35-year-old brother was still living with his parents was a big elephant in the room at every family gathering”.

Example 2: “We have become so obsessed with global warming that we have overlooked the real elephant in the room – the global food crisis”.

Isn’t it interesting to learn a little bit more about an idiomatic expression?

In case one expression is not enough for you, we have compiled many of the most-used English expressions in one FREE E-book!

We hope that you’ve learnt something new today. Is there any other expression you would like the origins from? Do you know of any other expression whose origins are interesting, funny or unexpected? Then leave us a comment below! 🙂