The Elephant in the Room

The image of something impossible to miss that everyone somehow ignores has a genuinely old literary ancestor: an 1814 Russian fable by Ivan Krylov, "The Inquisitive Man," about a museum visitor who notices every tiny curiosity on display while completely failing to notice the elephant. The fable became proverbial in Russian, and Dostoevsky even referenced it directly in his novel Demons. Whether that fable is actually where the English idiom comes from is a separate question nobody has answered. The English phrase itself is American, and its precise origin is unclear; the earliest confirmed print use in something close to its current sense is from 1959 in the New York Times, though a strikingly similar phrase turns up decades earlier, in 1915, in a British education journal, without any obvious connection between the two.