Elephant

#idiom Published: 2021-10-24

Here are two expressions related to “elephant”.

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Elephant in the Room

“Elephant in the room” means “the type of something obvious” or “a significant problem which is obviously present but ignored because it is more comfortable to do so”.

This expression is often used to describe topics involving social taboos or difficult issues (gender, religion, race, etc.). This expression was used as an explicit metaphor in 1959: “Financing schools has become a problem about equal to having an elephant in the living room”¹

Several variations include “elephant in the living room” and “elephant in the corner”.

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Blind Men and an Elephant

… many academic controversies [over the science of language] remind me of the blind men palpating the elephant. ²

I wrote about the word “palpate” in my past post, but still this sentence didn’t make sense to me.

It turns out that this is the Indian parable. The story is about blind people who have never seen an elephant before, palpating an elephant for the first time and trying to understand what it looks like. Since the elephant is so large, each person touches a different part of the body, and as a result, each person has a different understanding of its shape and texture. The moral of the story is that we tend to understand things based on our own limited experience.

Now the sentence above totally makes sense. The Japanese translation is 群盲象を評す. (Is it well known?)

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