In 1814, Ivan Krylov wrote a fable called The Inquisitive Man - who visited a museum full of tiny things, but fails to notice an elephant in the room. The phrase became proverbial in the novel Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky. This idiom is sometimes confused or paired in malaphor with the 800lb gorilla, often used in business to describe an indisputably dominant force. Its origin in the riddle, “where does an 800lb gorilla sit”? The confusion likely stems in the commonality that, like it or not, both are a problem too big to ignore. Pairs with vanilla bean ice cream, walnuts, coffee, and anywhere it wants