Marcel Berlins commented he had traced the expression to a 1989 BBC television film [ie Alan Clarke's 1989 short television film Elephant] whose director had said he had taken it from the Belfast writer Bernard MacLaverty. The latter had described the situation in Northern Ireland as like “having an elephant in your living room”, though with the sense of something difficult in your life that you got accustomed to and tried your best to ignore, as people in Northern Ireland did with the Troubles. Marcel Berlins said that MacLaverty had used the idea in a children’s story of 1978, A Man in Search of a Pet.
The Oxford English Dictionary has recently added an entry for the expression to its online service. It doesn’t mention MacLaverty and instead argues it’s originally American. The first example it has in our current sense is the title of a well-known American book of 1984 by Marion H Typpo and Jill M Hastings, An Elephant in the Living Room: a leader’s guide for helping children of alcoholics.
There are earlier examples. A piece in the Winnipeg Free Press in October 1976 said, “What is big and unfamiliar is mistrusted. Anyone would feel uncomfortable with an elephant in the living room, no matter how friendly it might be.” The OED’s entry also notes an example from the New York Times of June 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.” Neither of these are in our current sense.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2007-11-12 12:30 am (UTC)The Oxford English Dictionary has recently added an entry for the expression to its online service. It doesn’t mention MacLaverty and instead argues it’s originally American. The first example it has in our current sense is the title of a well-known American book of 1984 by Marion H Typpo and Jill M Hastings, An Elephant in the Living Room: a leader’s guide for helping children of alcoholics.
There are earlier examples. A piece in the Winnipeg Free Press in October 1976 said, “What is big and unfamiliar is mistrusted. Anyone would feel uncomfortable with an elephant in the living room, no matter how friendly it might be.” The OED’s entry also notes an example from the New York Times of June 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.” Neither of these are in our current sense.