Gorillas, Elephants and Common Usage, Oh my!

When I worked in corporate America, a couple colleagues and I used to entertain ourselves during long internal sales meetings by observing the overuse of the current business catch-phrases, idioms and metaphors. Over the course of a two or three day meeting, these words and phrases would begin to gradually morph and combine into misuse that was often more entertaining than the mere overuse. One example: During open discussions within our sales group, it was common for someone to try to add on to a colleague's point by using the segue, "And to piggyback on what Joe just said..." Trying not to overuse that one, a couple creative folks starting saying instead, "I'd just like to dovetail onto what Frank was saying..." By the end of the meeting, at least one person had morphed this into, "Let me piggytail on Susan's comments..." Highly entertaining.

I've always been hyper-aware of proper usage, particularly of idioms and phrases such as these. Yeah, I'm that person. The one that will cringe visibly when the wrong use of they're/their/there, your/you're, or its/it's is found in someone's writing. The one whose friends roll their eyes when I unconsciously toss out a correction of what they just said without even realizing I've done it. A few years ago I begged for (and gleefully received) Garner's Modern American Usage for my birthday, and it proudly sits on my desk, always within arm's reach, beside my Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus and Webster's Grammar and Punctuation Handbook.

But I'm not really the grammar police. I can't be - I didn't get a very good grammatical education myself. I didn't realize this until I spent two months studying in the Dominican Republic during college, and took daily Spanish classes. The teacher was trying to explain to me that the verb she had demonstrated on the board was the present participle... and I realized I couldn't translate it to its English equivalent because I didn't know what the present participle meant in English. I didn't learn a lot of the basics of grammar growing up. I don't think it's because I just checked out during those classes - I just think it didn't get taught, or taught well enough. (Please note the proper use of "its" and "it's" between those last three sentences. ...Sorry, couldn't resist.)

But I digress. The purpose of this post is not to talk about why I should or should not serve as the grammar police. It's actually about a very specific misuse and amalgamation of two common phrases, a misuse that drives me absolutely bonkers every time I hear it. In fact, it was hearing this misused phrase spoken by a newscaster on the radio last week that led me to create this blog in the first place. As I was stuck in traffic and I heard the idiomatic violation so offhandedly thrown, not into a casual conversation of the uninformed, but into the newscast of a well-respected reporter on a huge Chicago talk-radio station, I sat stewing and composing my rant in my mind. And then I thought, "I should start a blog, and this will be my first post!"

Okay, so it's actually my third post, and by now I've rambled so long that I'll be surprised if anyone actually makes it far enough in this to even learn what oft-combined phrases have me so aggravated. They are: "The 800-pound gorilla" and "the elephant in the room".

People. Those are the phrases. No combination. No variation. However, it is quite common to hear "the 800-pound gorilla in the room." AAAAAAUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!

To understand why you can't combine them, you need to understand what each means. "The elephant in the room" refers to some a problem or controversial issue that’s obviously present but which everyone ignores or avoids mentioning, usually because it’s politically or socially embarrassing. Or another way of describing it: a situation where something major is going on, it's on everyone's mind and impossible to ignore, but no one is actually addressing it. For example, one might say, "Bob's recent divorce was the elephant in the room that put a slight but perceptible damper on the holiday festivities."

As for "the 800-pound gorilla", this phrase actually has its origin in a joke: "Where does an 800-pound gorilla sit? Anywhere he wants!" The phrase is used to mean a business entity that is virtually unstoppable or impossible to compete with because of its sheer size. For example, one could say that "Apple is the 800-pound gorilla in the MP3 player market." The phrase is most commonly used in this business-world context. There's a great further description of what it means here.

As you can see, these idioms have very different meanings. Their various forms of amalgamation (the 800-pound gorilla in the room, the 800-pound elephant, etc) only serve to muddle the true definition of either. Additionally, I've seen the elephant phrase further destroyed by being blended with other phrases: "The pink elephant in the room" or "the white elephant in the room". ("Seeing pink elephants" is a euphamism for drunken hallucination, and a "white elephant" is a valuable possession of which its owner cannot dispose and whose cost (particularly cost of upkeep) is out of proportion to its usefulness.

Now to play Devil's advocate, one could argue that an idiom only means what people understand it to mean. Neither of these phrases is defined by its literal definition. So if a Chicago newscaster says "the 800-pound gorilla in the room" and the context leads one to understand that he means "the thing no one's talking about", then isn't it okay? Isn't the purpose of spoken and written language to communicate a concept between people? If said concept is understood, isn't it okay if the communicator's message was conveyed through a phrase that is being used in a manner other than intended? Well, call me a purist... but NO!

I'm certainly not the 800-pound gorilla in the world of modern American usage that's going to drive the change here, but the elephant in the room is that many people cavalierly throw phrases into their daily language without really understanding what they're saying.