elephant in the room
Pluralelephants in the room
- 1An obvious problem or difficult issue that the people involved ignore because facing it would be inconvenient or uncomfortable.
The budget deficit was the elephant in the room at the council meeting, and no one dared to raise it.
Before the merger talks could go anywhere, someone had to address the elephant in the room: which chief executive would stay.
Note
The image is comic and exact: an elephant standing in a room, too big to miss, while everyone talks around it. Its origin is uncertain, probably American, though Ivan Krylov's 1814 fable The Inquisitive Man, whose museum visitor notices everything except an elephant, may be an ancestor. It nearly always takes the: people address, ignore or name the elephant in the room.
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Origin
Likely of US origin, or possibly from Ivan Krylov's 1814 fable The Inquisitive Man, in which a man visiting a museum notices all sorts of things except an elephant.