What Was the First ‘Elephant in the Room’?

We each know of a topic we would rather not discuss — perhaps because it’s too sensitive, controversial, or emotionally charged. No one wants to cause embarrassment, sadness, or avoidable arguments. This topic that people dance around in conversation or outright ignore is called “the elephant in the room.” The idiom is widely used to mean “an obvious major problem or issue that people avoid discussing or acknowledging.”

If you break apart the metaphor, it makes sense — there’s a looming presence, but rather than deal with the elephant, everyone simply pretends it doesn’t exist.

The elephant in question can be traced to a short story published in 1814 by Ivan Krylov, a Russian writer. “The Inquisitive Man” is an ironically titled fable about a man touring a museum who notices tiny things, such as beetles, but fails to notice an elephant in the room.

Fyodor Dostoevsky alluded to Krylov’s museum-going character in his 1871 novel, Demons: “Belinsky was just like Krylov’s Inquisitive Man, who didn’t notice the elephant in the museum.”

In 1882, Mark Twain further popularized the idiom in his short story “The Stolen White Elephant.” He wrote about the inept, far-ranging antics of detectives trying to find an elephant that was right before them.

The elephantine metaphor evolved into its modern usage of avoiding difficult and obvious conversations as it spread through the public lexicon in the 20th century. In 1902, The New York Times published an article about a scandal involving vote-buying and corruption allegations surrounding NYC Police Chief Thomas J. Devery and the political organization Tammany Hall, in which the journalist used “elephant in the room” metaphorically to describe the way that scandal was being ignored by the media. In the 1950s, many journalists used “elephant in the room” to depict reluctance to discuss racism in America, even though it was a major societal problem. Sometimes the phrase is used to suggest big topics that can’t be ignored. In 1959, The New York Times used it in reference to school financing: “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.”