Origin of Military Expression

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Frank Erdoini calling from San Diego.

Hi, Frank, welcome.

Hi, Frank.

Hello.

Hi, what’s going on?

Well, I’m an old graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, and, you know, it’s a place that

Being both a college and the military is pretty deeply layered with its own jargon.

Oh, yeah.

But one came up the other day in a conversation between me and a classmate that, even though

I’ve heard it many times over the years, for the first time it struck me as just profoundly weird.

Now, he and I, we graduated at a time we managed to serve our entire military careers during peacetime, so we’ve never been in combat.

But his son, who is graduating this summer, has managed to snag a commission in the infantry.

And when we were sitting down and talking about that and the war in Afghanistan, he turned to me and said, yes, in no short time, my son will have seen the elephant.

And that’s the phrase. And it’s one that I’ve heard many times through the years. I’ve always understood it, you know, when spoken between soldiers to mean somebody who has been in combat, who has actually been, had bullets fired at him in anger. But seeing the elephant, it frankly makes no sense to me whatsoever.

Enemy elephants, right. That’s weird. It is weird.

I love it. It’s an old term. It’s got a great history in the military, but the military use is an offshoot of, well, it goes back to 1835 or so, if you can believe that.

Perhaps even older. That’s the best that I’ve been able to do.

There’s an anecdote in some of the old reference works that I think does a pretty good job of perhaps explaining the origin of this.

And originally, and even occasionally still, it doesn’t just mean that you’ve seen something remarkable, that you’ve experienced something that most people haven’t.

It’s that you did it and you found the experience wanting.

That’s outside of the military usually.

If you’ve seen the elephant, you’re like, oh, yeah, I’ve seen the elephant.

I’ve been there.

There it was.

Big whoop.

Really?

And in the military, it tends to be, I’ve seen combat.

And even during the gold rush period in California, to see the elephant meant that you just went to California or that you worked a gold mine.

And as a matter of fact, there were a number of gold mines in California that were named the elephant.

In kind of a reference to this slang expression.

It’s pretty interesting stuff.

But this anecdote in Bartlett’s Book of Americanisms,

The short version of it is that he says it might have come from an old ballad

Of a farmer who, while driving his mare along the highway,

He met with a showman’s elephant, let’s say a traveling circus or a traveling fair.

And the elephant knocked the farmer over and spilt his milk and destroyed his eggs.

And so the farmer, you know, basically having all of his produce destroyed and nothing to show for it,

Consoled himself with the fact, well, at least he’d seen the elephants.

Wow. So the earliest use of it was not military.

Right. Yeah. As far as we can tell, it’s an old expression.

Like I say, 1835 for certain. I would not be surprised if it’s much older than that.

Like the gigantic mammals of the earth, they call them charismatic megafauna.

What? What?

Like elephants have long been so exceedingly rare that they were often creatures of mystery and discussion

And often used as models for different linguistic expressions in a lot of different languages and a lot of cultures around the world.

Once the elephant became known outside of the places where the elephant is native,

The elephant immediately worked itself into the language of the world.

See, now, I was guessing that it would go all the way back to maybe the Punic War to send Hannibal’s elephant.

That was what jumped into my mind when you said that.

Because I haven’t heard it in civilian life, seeing the elephant.

Oh, you haven’t?

No.

I’ve heard things like, you know, how are you going to keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Harry?

It’s certainly not that common outside of the military anymore.

But you can go back as recently as the 30s or 40s in the United States and find it in books and magazine articles.

It’s definitely a bit of color that fiction writers like to use.

Oh, yeah?

As far as day-to-day speech, I can’t say that I’ve ever seen it outside of the reference works.

Well, if the elephant broke his eggs, I can understand why he saw something and wasn’t all that happy about it.

Thank you so much.

I really appreciate you looking that one up for me.

Thanks a lot, Frank.

Our pleasure.

Y’all take care.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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