<P> This idiomatic expression may have been in general use much earlier than 1959 . For example, the phrase appears 44 years earlier in the pages of a British journal, Journal of Education, in 1915 . The sentence was presented as a trivial illustration of a question British schoolboys would be able to answer, e.g., "Is there an elephant in the class - room?" </P> <P> The first widely disseminated conceptual reference was a story written by Mark Twain in 1882, "The Stolen White Elephant", which slyly dissects the inept, far - ranging activities of detectives trying to find an elephant that was right on the spot after all . This may have been the reference in the legal opinion of United States v. Leviton, 193 F. 2d 848 (2nd Circuit, 1951), makes reference in its opinion, "As I have elsewhere observed, it is like the Mark Twain story of the little boy who was told to stand in a corner and not to think of a white elephant ." </P> <P> A slightly different version of the phrase was used before this, with George Berkeley talking of whether or not there is "an invisible elephant in the room" in his debates with scientists . </P> <P> In 1935, comedian Jimmy Durante starred on Broadway in the Billy Rose Broadway musical Jumbo, in which a police officer stops him while leading a live elephant and asks, "What are you doing with that elephant?" Durante's reply, "What elephant?" was a regular show - stopper . Durante reprises the piece in the 1962 film version of the play, Billy Rose's Jumbo . </P>

Where does the phrase the elephant in the room come from