The elephant in the room is the huge obvious problem everyone politely ignores. Name the elephant in the room.
It is only an elephant if everybody knows, since the silence is the whole point. Naming the elephant in the room is the most useful thing anybody says in most meetings.
1phraseelephant in the roomThe huge obvious problem everyone politely ignores.
“Nobody mentioned the elephant in the room for the whole hour.”
elephant in the room is a phrase.
Likely US origin, or possibly from Ivan Andreyevich Krylov's 1814 fable, The Inquisitive Man, which tells of a man going to a museum and noticing all sorts of things apart from an elephant.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Idioms