<P> It is based on the idea / thought that something as conspicuous as an elephant can appear to be overlooked in codified social interactions, and that the sociology / psychology of repression also operates on the macro scale . </P> <P> In 1814, Ivan Andreevich Krylov (1769--1844), poet and fabulist, wrote a fable entitled "The Inquisitive Man" which tells of a man who goes to a museum and notices all sorts of tiny things, but fails to notice an elephant . The phrase became proverbial . Fyodor Dostoevsky in his novel' Demons' wrote,' Belinsky was just like Krylov's Inquisitive Man, who didn't notice the elephant in the museum ...' </P> <P> The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first recorded use of the phrase, as a simile, in The New York Times on June 20, 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 ." </P> <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>

Where does the term elephant in the room come from