August 26, 1998

pink elephants

I know that to have the "pink elephant" follow you home means one is dead drunk, but have you any clue to its origin? My friends and I were talking about it and our best story had something to do with, while staggeringly drunk, joining the circus as a clown. Is that even close?

No, but it's an amusing story.

The phrase pink elephant is not normally used as you describe it. The standard meaning is 'hallucinations caused by excessive alcohol intake', usually used in the phrase "to see pink elephants" meaning 'to be very drunk'. Once defined in terms of hallucinations, the origin is clear: if you're so drunk that you're seeing pink elephants before your eyes, you are quite drunk indeed.

The earliest example for a related usage is found in the late 1890s, where the hallucinated creature is pink giraffe. In this case, it is used in the way you describe it: "pink giraffes following me all around." The elephant becomes the beast of choice by the 1910s, when Jack London wrote about "the man...who...sees...blue mice and pink elephants."

(The animated sequence of elephants blowing pink bubbles, set to Ponchielli's "Dance of the Hours" in Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940), may allude to the expression pink elephant, but it is certainly not the inspiration for it.)