elephant

   Normally what one calls someone who has just stepped on one’s toe, either the word on its own or ‘you elephant!’ There is a passage in King Solomon’s Mines, by H.Rider Haggard, which gives a different slant on this term, and reflects in passing the attitudes of a by-gone era: ‘Is it to that land that thou wouldst journey, Incubu?’ (A native word meaning, I believe, an elephant, and the name given to Sir Henry by the Kafirs.) I asked him sharply what he meant by addressing his master in that familiar way. It is very well for natives to have a name for one among themselves, but it is not decent that they should call one by their heathenish appellations to one’s face.