tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339541743624368462.post1605314576936461781..comments2024-02-10T21:11:00.659-08:00Comments on Early Sports and Pop Culture History Blog: Two-and-a-half Idioms - the History and Etymology of "White Elephants"Peter Jensen Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042588192094310236noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339541743624368462.post-83736560110965993082021-08-15T12:03:28.295-07:002021-08-15T12:03:28.295-07:00More stuff gets put online and searchable all the ...More stuff gets put online and searchable all the time. Here are a couple of earlier published versions of the white elephant gift story. From 1858:<br /><br />When the King of Siam, they say, has resolved upon the ruin of a courtier, he makes him a present of a white elephant. As the animal is thrice sacred in Siamese eyes, the luckless baillee, or garnishee, or possessor of the brute, dare neither sell, kill, nor neglect it; and the daily ration of rice, hay, and sugar which the albino monster devours, soon reduces the courtier to irremediable bankruptcy. Moral : avoid courts. If this were a despotic country, and her Majesty the Empress of Britain should take it into her head to ruin Baron Rothschild or the Marquis of Westminster (and indeed I have heard that the impoverished nobleman just mentioned is haunted by the fear of dying in a workhouse), I don't think she could more easily effect her purpose than by giving him LONDON, and bidding him feed it for a week.<br /><br />—George Augustus Sala (yup, him again, the same one quoted above), <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.32000013015393&view=1up&seq=55&skin=2021&q1=elephant" rel="nofollow">Twice Round the Clock, or the Hours of the Day and Night in London</a>, first published in <i>The Welcome Guest: A Magazine of Recreative Reading for All</i>, May 15, 1858, p. 39; later reprinted as a book.<br /><br />(Sala must have had white elephants on the brain; he wrote still another story where a socialite is nicknamed White Elephant "for she was very fair" and danced like an elephant.)<br /><br />And from 1854, in a debate in the U.S. House of Representatives:<br /><br />Sir, in the kingdom of Siam, when a Minister wants to break down a rival Minister at court, he proceeds to ask the King to give his rival a white elephant. The King does it; and the favored man spends his wealth, his time, and his life, in trying to take care of this royal gift of the King. Mr. Chairman, this white elephant is an emblem of the claims which are brought against our Government.<br /><br />—Rep. Joseph R. Chandler (Whig-Pennsylvania), April 21, 1854. <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=chi.19213679&view=1up&seq=264&skin=2021" rel="nofollow">The Congressional Globe</a>.<br /><br />I was surprised to find an American cite this early. But since the stories about veneration of white elephants and "the gift of the nabob" were both so common, it's possible that they were independently conflated by different people in the US and the UK.<br />ktschwarznoreply@blogger.com