Talk:Seeing pink elephants

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This article was nominated for deletion on 29 June 2008. The result of the discussion was keep.

Medical diagnosis and pop culture[edit]

Every popular culture depiction I've seen of pink elephants has been closer to alcoholic hallucinosis (aftermath of a heavy drinking episode) than delirium tremens (long-term withdrawal).--Pharos (talk) 20:39, 31 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The Jack London derivation noted as "first recorded" is easily disproven with a Google Books date-limited search. I found these two references to "pink elephants" with regard to drunkenness in 1900 and 1910, respectively. The derivation story needs more nuanced revision. Jack London didn't coin this phrase.

Blue Pencil

Happy Hawkins -Michelle

Image[edit]

Is the image really necessary? I think most people would have a conception of a pink elephant. It seems superfluous.-Jickyincognito (talk) 19:36, 11 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Really! It's silly and doesn't help the content of the article.--Theodore Kloba (talk) 14:03, 24 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that the fact that there is a pink elephant on the Tanzanian note is completely irrelevant to the phrase "Seeing pink elephants". If you can somehow link the image more directly to the article, feel free to restore the image and update the text. Otherwise, I'm pulling it

192.35.35.35 (talk) 19:04, 27 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Trivia section[edit]

If any of these are really useful, please incorporate then as text into the article. Tim Vickers (talk) 14:12, 6 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

A reference to pink elephants occurs in the 1941 Disney animated classic Dumbo. Dumbo, having taken a drink of water from a bucket spiked with moonshine, begins to hallucinate singing and dancing "Pink Elephants on Parade".
Jazz musician Sun Ra performed this Disney song often with his band the Arkestra in the 1970s, and said that he did so because humanity needed calming to prevent nuclear war.
In The Simpsons episode "D'oh-in' in the Wind", Barney Gumble, under the influence of peyote, has a hallucination of a monster. He quickly drinks a beer, which causes a pink elephant in a top hat and monocle to appear and destroy the monster. He calls the elephant "Pinky", implying a familiar relationship between them, as the elephant tips his hat to him.
The phrase is also used in Maakies, a comic strip by Tony Millionaire, in a strip entitled "It's The Early Bird! Run!!"
A slight variation on the pink elephant appeared in Punch Trunk, a 1953 Looney Tunes cartoon, in which a drunk spots a tiny (but grey) elephant, looks at his watch, and proclaims to the elephant "You're late!" He then staggers away, commenting "He always used to be pink." The animated film Daffy Duck's Quackbusters shows the elephant being spotted by a great number of people, which Daffy misconstrues as public hysteria.
In Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 Ollie the Magic Bum, assumed to be drunk, gives a mission involving collecting Pink Elephants.
If characters in certain areas of World of Warcraft ingest large amounts of alcohol, tiny pink elekks (which bear a strong resemblance to elephants) appear, along with various other hallucinations.

In Spanish?[edit]

I'm Spanish and I have never heard of 'diablos azules' or anything such. Maybe that's Mexican or Latin American? At least in Spain, the analogue of 'pink elephants' would be 'elefantes rosas', which, unsurprisingly, means 'pink elephants'. Estradin (talk) 12:58, 25 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

quite different meaning[edit]

In [1] the author states
Lack of water has been Bali’s “pink elephant in the room” for decades. Discussions on the growing gap between the island’s water supply and the everincreasing demand have been a staple among academics, environmentalists…
and IMHO he writes about an ignored but obvious enormity. Isn't that used more often? He must have some feeling for being understood. Isn't this a case for an amendment of this article? Horst Emscher (talk) 11:36, 6 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]