The "elephant in the room" is one of the most popular phrases among reporters, columnists and TV pundits. A study of the Daily Nation found more than 3,000 uses of the phrase, which has become a cliché.
The Oxford Dictionary defines a cliché as a phrase that is overused and betrays a lack of original thought. In practice, a phrase becomes a cliché when it is overused and no longer effective. But that can be a subjective judgment. If you’re meeting the phrase for the first time, it may sound original, fresh and effective. If you’ve met the phrase a thousand times, it may sound hackneyed, stale or banal.
The NMG Manual of Style and Usage urges reporters to avoid clichés. The AP Stylebook, the leading guide in journalism writing, advises reporters to avoid clichés “like the plague”. Clichés, it says, are loved by lazy writers.
The elephant in the room is a metaphor for a problem everyone sees but nobody wants to talk about. It invokes the image of an elephant that you can’t fail to notice in a room. It is a clever and graphic figure of speech that signifies a taboo subject—an obvious problem or issue that is being ignored.
A Nation study shows the phrase is mostly used in the paper even when it is not appropriate; that is why it has lost its original meaning. Examples are numerous. Let me cite only one, as an indication: “The historic Africa Climate Summit in Nairobi from September 4 to 6 [2023] agreed on a pathway to the continent’s modernisation driven by renewable energy. … But the real elephant in the room is how the continent will pay for its green growth.”
However, funding was never an elephant in the room. On the contrary, it was the controversy in the conference—what everyone was talking about.
The elephant in the room is not just any problem; it is a problem that people are staring at but choosing to ignore because it is uncomfortable to talk about it. In fact, the more correct idiom should be “the elephant in the living room”. Because it is in the living room, where people entertain guests and avoid conversations that are socially uncomfortable.
The elephant in the room is not African, even though African languages are rich with elephant idioms. Some online sources list more than 50 such idioms. Among the best known of them are “When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers”, “An elephant doesn’t get tired of carrying its tusks” and “There is not enough room for two elephants to sit in the same shade”.
Ironically, the phrase has murky origins in foreign lands, where they don’t even have elephants except in zoos. According to available literature, it was coined by a Russian poet in 1814, the British Journal of Education in 1915 or the New York Times in 1959. It depends on whom you want to believe.
It is not surprising the phrase was not discovered by Africans. While it is conceivable a Mount Kenya Forest or Tsavo National Park jumbo could, given a chance, enter European or American living rooms, which have high ceilings, it is inconceivable that it could enter a traditional African hut. Instead, it would reach to the thatched roof and blow it away with a single snort, bark, grunt or trumpet.
If Africans needed to coin such a metaphor, it would probably have been something like “the monkey in the room”. Or, perhaps more appropriately, “the elephant in the garden” or “the herd of elephants in the garden”.
Regardless of its origins, the elephant in the room shouldn’t be used in contexts that shows it has lost its original meaning and has become trite and commonplace. Reporters and columnists shouldn’t force the idiom on problems that have no elephant in them. They shouldn’t use it to glorify, romanticise or dramatise a problem that has been acknowledged and is on everybody’s lips.
If a problem is acknowledged and has been talked about, writers should leave the elephant out of it. They should let the poor animal go to a secret grave where it can lie down and die, not force it into a living room. They shouldn’t use the idiom unless it truly reflects the situation.
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