Meaning
Said of a person with an exceptionally long, retentive memory - above all for past slights, injuries and favors. Usually half-joking, it often carries a gentle warning that a kindness will be repaid, and an insult neither forgotten nor forgiven. Now usually jocular. It leans toward memory for wrongs more than favors, so it can carry a faint threat. Do not confuse with white elephant, already catalogued here, a separate idiom about useless burdens. Regional use: English worldwide; popularized in the United States in the 1930s.
Origin
The belief in elephant memory is old, but the fixed English proverb is recent. The earliest close variant is the closing line of Saki's 'Reginald on Besetting Sins' in Reginald (1904): 'Women and elephants never forget an injury' - verified verbatim on Wikisource. Edison Marshall's story 'The Elephant Remembers' (Everybody's Magazine, October 1919) uses the shorter form as a ready-made proverb: 'For an elephant never forgets.' The Random House Dictionary of Popular Proverbs records the fixed form as first attested in the United States in W. Martyn's 1937 novel Blue Ridge and 'probably of Greek origin', Stevenson noting that 'the Greeks sometimes say, the camel never forgets an injury'. Debunked: the claim that Marryat's Mr Midshipman Easy (1836) holds the first use is false - the novel's full text contains no elephant at all, verified in the Project Gutenberg edition. Science backs the proverb's premise: Shirley and Jenny, reunited at The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee in 1999, recognized each other after 23 years apart.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- the elephant always remembers
- women and elephants never forget an injury
Usage Examples
- She still brings up the remark her cousin made at the wedding in 2009 - the elephant never forgets.
- Thank the intern personally; the elephant never forgets a kindness.
- He apologized twice, but the elephant never forgets, and neither does my mother.