The American-born expression “the elephant in the (living) room” refers to a problem or controversial issue that’s clearly present but actively avoided because it’s politically or socially embarrassing (i.e. Race is the elephant in the room for the 2008 presidential election.)
The meaning, if not the exact wording, dates from at least the 1950s and is possibly even older. The first known citation that uses the phrase conveying our current understanding of it is in the title of Typpo and Hastings’s 1984 book, An Elephant in the Living Room: A Leader’s Guide for Helping Children of Alcoholics.
The number of times that authors have used the expression in recent years to describe topics that they felt were being skirted and deserved more attention has made it cliched.
In September 2006, the British artist Banksy brought the phrase to life (literally) with an exhibit of a painted (real) elephant in a room in the Barely Legal exhibition in Los Angeles that addressed the issue of global poverty. By painting the elephant in the same bold pattern as the room’s wallpaper, Banksy emphasized the phrase’s meaning by both making the elephant even more obvious and by giving those who chose to ignore it an opportunity to pretend that it had simply blended into the wallpaper.