The Elephant in the Room

Since I outed the scapegoats (the animals and others blamed for our human foibles), it would be wrong not to mention the unwieldy unmentionable, that burdensome beast we’re not directly addressing but attributing, if vaguely, to every inelegant issue too overwhelming to handle.

Long overdue thunderous drumroll for: the elephant in the room. May we heed him, his thick skin, and his infinite memory. A short post today for this behemoth.

The elephant is code for all human-ignored evils in the known universe, of which there are many, from climate change and racism to the emperor’s pitiful lack of clothes. Matters too massive for sweeping under the rug.

When I dig into etymology of words and phrases I usually get to unravel a long tangle from the beginning of language, or at least to some precocious writer/philosopher/scientist of 1800s. But these room-elephants are reportedly a recent species born into common parlance in only 1985 along with gel bracelets and sucralose, according to Merriam-Webster.

1985 was also supposedly the dawn of words from sexual predator to mixtape and step aerobics while we further busied ourselves with the launch of Nintendo, the first Macintosh computer, global Live Aid concerts for Ethiopian famine relief, Presidential talks to chip away at the Cold War, and the song “We are the World”:

A few phrases in this word cloud that seem anachronistic to me: “junk email” and those elephants. I assumed the dawn of email came much later (I remember first learning of such a concept toward the end of college in the mid-’90s) but in fact, there was regular email and already wretched “junk” email as early as the 1970s. If we had known what sort of spam meat this might make, maybe we would have steered clear. As far as the elephants, it’s a good idea, as I tell my kids, to double-check your sources.

When I dig deeper, the elephant has indeed been lumbering around this repressive tea party for hundreds of years. The first known use of “elephant in the room” was from a Russian fable by poet Ivan Krylov, “The Inquisitive Man” of 1814 and continues on from there. It’s a tiny tale, pictured here along with the biggest land animal. The man notices in the museum (“ a palace of wonders”) all the minutia of flies, butterflies, cockroaches, beetles “some like emeralds, others like coral.” But somehow he overlooks the elephant.

Another Russian makes reference to this curious spectator of the small. In the novel Demons, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “Belinsky was just like Krylov’s Inquisitive Man, who didn’t notice the elephant in the museum.” But the phrase didn’t become common proverbial parlance until the 1900s, when the New York Times is first credited by the OED as using it as a simile in 1959 with “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.”

In popular culture, it’s just a common cliché these days, as is our (very American?) habit of ignoring uncomfortable topics from race to religion, homosexuality, suicide, mental illness.

A handful of notable movies, books and shows that mention such elephants in all sorts of way are:

• A book titled An Elephant in the Living Room: A Leader’s Guide for Helping Children of Alcoholics (1984)
• The Breakfast Club (1985), the students in detention are all aware of the social problems that divide them, but they are afraid to talk about
• The Silence of the Lambs (1992), Hannibal Lecter describes how the FBI are ignoring that there’s a serial killer on the loose
• Se7en (1995), used when forced to confront this beast when they discover a series of gruesome murders that are linked to the seven deadly sins
• The Kite Runner (2003), the novel’s protagonist learns that he has been complicit in a crime that he has been trying to forget
• Friends (1994-2004), the characters on the long-running series often avoid talking about the problems they all know about, and they use this idiom often
• Finally, there was a television ad campaign for National Eating Disorders Association featuring an elephant in a room full of people, to represent the taboo topic of eating disorders

Elephants as usual get a bum deal. Why do they have to carry these loads?

Allergic to small talk, I say let’s tackle these topics and normalize the oversize mammal in our midst, which inevitably makes him shrink down to more manageable scale so he too might enjoy the party and not feel so freakish.

A good anecdote to cowering in shame is sharing our private stories, like they do so delicately in the confessional podcast of The Secret Room (ripe with ne’r told tales such as “I hate my sister,” or “my ex-husband burned his own house down on purpose.”

What’s a subject we should better address in our contemporary times? What’s the unspeakable thing in your secret room?