The elephant in the room



The preverbial elephant in the room

Have you ever experienced an uneasy feeling between you and someone else in a room or even between you and a crowd in a room? I’m sure you have at some or other stage. The Elephant in the room is usually referred to when there is an uneasy topic of discussion or if a certain uneasy discussion needs to take place.

We have all been faced with this – parents with their children, spouses with each other, bosses and employees and even friends with one another. In all our day to day lives and professions we experience this in some form or the other. The elephant in the room is used in many different contexts, business, in the design and interior industry, in money markets and boardrooms to name a few.

Its Origins according to Wikipidea - The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first recorded use of the phrase, as a simile, as The New York Times on June 20, 1959: "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."

This idiomatic expression may have been in general use much earlier than 1959. For example, the phrase appears 44 years earlier in the pages of a British journal in 1915. The sentence was presented as a trivial illustration of question British schoolboys would be able to answer, e.g., "Is there an elephant in the class-room?"

There has been a musical item, book, play and drama series based on this phrase and is used in many forms the world over.

Elephant in the room" is an English metaphorical idiom for an obvious truth that is being ignored or goes unaddressed. The idiomatic expression also applies to an obvious problem or risk no one wants to discuss.

It is based on the idea that an elephant in a room would be impossible to overlook; thus, people in the room who pretend the elephant is not there have chosen to avoid dealing with the looming big issue.