Gorilla or elephant?

[auld argonian]

I'm going waaaay of topic here but only because I've found that you guys and girls are some of the most literate and well read folks that I encounter on a regular basis...

...and I got a beef!

As I learned them, there are two expressions and they seem to be getting mixed up lately and I wanted a few opinions on what went wrong.

Phrase one: Q: Where does an eight hundred pound gorilla sleep? A: Anyhwere he wants to.

Phrase two: "...it's like the elephant in the room...everybody knows it's there but no one will talk about it."

Okay? I always understood that the gorilla slept wherever he wanted to and nobosy would talk about the elephant. How did these get flipped so that nobody was talking about the gorilla and the elephant seems to have disappeared entirely? Those of us in the USA have no doubt seen the TV commercial for a retirement funding company that features an impossibly huge gorilla that represents that saving for retirement that nobody wants to acknowledge is a necessity...if they don't want to acknowledge it, it should be an elephant...right?

This may seem small but it's driving me crazy...someone just announced a new show called "The Eight Hundred Pound Gorilla in the Room", thus perpetuating this misunderstanding.

So think back and tell me: how do you remember these two expressions being phrased? It's like someone I know who used to say, "...step up to the bat", to which I'd say, "No! You mead step UP to the PLATE...you GO TO BAT for someone but you don't STEP UP to the BAT for someone...."

Language....go figger!

Best

AA

[beloitpiper]

Yeah, I've always known it to be "an elephant in the room", but then again, language is fluid and will change naturally over time. Maybe this is just evolution. A stupid, unnecessary evolution, but an evolution nonetheless.

[Clockwork John]

I know those expressions the same way you do.

It seems to me that the English language, or at least the American form of it, is steadily declining, rather than evolving. People use more and more words incorrectly. People's vocabularies are steadily shrinking. And, as you pointed out, people forget the meanings and origins of commonly used phrases, and over time, begin to use them incorrectly.

[auld argonian]

Yeah...it seems like an example of an American Linguistics Expert would be Norm Crosby; "Good evening, adults and adulteresses."

Best

AA

[Galician]

O tempus, O mores! One can only lament how language has been declining since the days of that accursed tower.

[TheKiltedWonder]

I know those expressions the same way you do.

It seems to me that the English language, or at least the American form of it, is steadily declining, rather than evolving. People use more and more words incorrectly. People's vocabularies are steadily shrinking. And, as you pointed out, people forget the meanings and origins of commonly used phrases, and over time, begin to use them incorrectly.

The current form of the language is no more "incorrect" than at any other point in its history. And American English tends to change slower in any ways than British English. Many of the things Brits jokingly point out as "wrong" in American English were perfectly correct 200 years ago in England. As for people forgetting the meanings and origins of phrases and words, it has been my experience that very few people know the actual origins of any phrase or word, but rely on interesting but incorrect folk-etymologies. "Nice" used to mean "silly" and "cretin" originally meant "Christian" (in that "even they are Christian" i.e. human). The list goes on.
That doesn't mean you have to like language change. I personally find it sad when people write the word "till" as "til". "Till" was the original, then "until" was created and both were used and now most people assume that "till" is a shortening of "until" and skip the second "l". But it's a natural process. Language never becomes "broken" and is never in decline; early dictionaries used to rail against "bad usage" and generally cited Shakespeare for it
Language always works just as well even after change, as Chaucer noted in Troilus and Criseyde:

You all know too, that in the nature of language is change
Within a thousand years words then
that had value, now very odd and strange
We find them; and yet they spoke them so
And fared as well in love as men now do.

The bad translation is mine. See his original version to see the "decline" of the English language.

[slohairt]

And here I thought this thread was going to be a silly discussion about who would win: a gorilla vs. an elephant!

(Just for the record, I think the elephant would win.)

As for the steady decline of the English language, here are some chestnuts I always hear:

- double negatives of any kind
- people using "supposably" when they mean supposedly!
- "real" instead of "really"
- "taunt" instead of "taut"

[TheKiltedWonder]

As for the steady decline of the English language, here are some chestnuts I always hear:

- double negatives of any kind

Come now, I just showed we shouldn't think of it as "decline"... Pleeease!
As for double negtives. They've long been part of the English language. They used to be used to strengthen a negative, which is how they are used today. The idea that double negatives make a positive was not introduced until Robert Lowth decided in the late 18th Century that English should follow more mathematical and "logical" rules. Only then did it became ungrammatical. But informal/"uneducated" use of the language has always preserved the traditional negative usage.

[berserkbishop]

I see that someone is familiar with C.S. Lewis and his Mere Christianity eh Coemgen?

I have to blame a problem with language misuse and a loss of certain "big" words in the general publics' vocabulary partly on the school system. When I was in 8th grade, I read on a college level, and everyone else in the my class at least read on an 8th grade level or they had special education classes. Today I find that most kids in the 8th grade average a 6th grade reading level, many less than that, and no attention is paid to that. Conversely, the math I was doing my senior year in high school was calculus, where as kids in the same school now are taking college level algebra.

Bishop

[bikeolounger]

Hmm...we are taught that the double negative does NOT mean a positive (despite the mathematic implication otherwise), and that double-negatives are grammatically incorrect. Nowhere, however, do we try using a double-positive to imply a negative.






Yeah, right.



I've heard the expression, "elephant under the rug." I have sometimes heard this expression to include that the elephant was hiding under the rug.


I had also heard about elephants in the room, but they were usually pink, and related to the lack of sobriety of the person claiming their presence.