World Wide Words

Where does the term "The Elephant in the room" come from? I ask this because I just asked it myself earlier. I heard students in my fiction class suggest that Hemingway's story "Hills Like White Elephants" evoked that saying. That's a great theory, but, according to World Wide Words, a language web site, it can't be true. By their research, we learn that the phrase goes back not into the 1920s when Hemingway was writing this story, but only into the 1970s. Check out World Wide Words if you're into language oddities and word/phrase origins.