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.

[Chase]

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[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.

[McMurdo]

It was always the 800 lb Gorilla and the Elephant in the room, not sure where the change came from.

Below is an excerpt from an essay by George Orwell regarding the decline of the English Language.

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is
Generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent,
and our language — so the arguments runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows
that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to
electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language
is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.


Here is the entire piece

[Moosedog]

Hm. I always thought it was a 900-pound gorilla in the room...and as I used to live in the Great White North, it was the bear who slept anywhere he wanted to.

I'm not sure I consider this disparity to be an example of the decline of the quality of English. It just seems like a regional/natural variation to me.


Moosedog

[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"