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white elephant

 
Dictionary: white elephant

n.
    1. A rare, expensive possession that is a financial burden to maintain.
    2. Something of dubious or limited value.
  1. An article, ornament, or household utensil no longer wanted by its owner.
  2. An endeavor or venture that proves to be a conspicuous failure.
  3. A rare whitish or light-gray form of the Asian elephant, often regarded with special veneration in regions of southeast Asia and India.

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Wordsmith Words: white elephant
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(hwyt, wyt EL-uh-fent)
noun 1. An expensive, rare possession costing a lot to maintain.
2. A possession no longer of value to its owner.
3. An albino elephant.

Etymology
From the King of Siam's reputed practice of awarding a white elephant to a courtier who had fallen out of favor. A white elephant was considered sacred and couldn't be put to work, so the upkeep of the animal would ruin its owner.

Usage
"Having spent N85 billion, you said NEPA will still need more money to get to its maximum efficiency. ... How can you convince Nigerians that NEPA is not a white elephant project?" — Olalekan Bilesanmi; Nigerians Don't Want to Pay; Vanguard (Apapa, Nigeria); Sep 7, 2003.

"Mirabel (airport) is open for business - it is staffed by a team of bored security guards immaculately clad in Canadian Mountie-style hats. The only things missing are the flights and passengers. The airport, 45 miles north of Montreal, is Canada's most notorious white elephant." — Andrew Clark; Lesson of Canadian Airport in Terminal Decline; The Guardian (London, UK); Sep 23, 2003.


Investment Dictionary: White Elephant
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Any investment that nobody wants because it is unprofitable.

Investopedia Says:
The term 'White Elephant' is derived from Thailand, where an Albino (white) elephant was given to unfavored people by the ruler. Because these elephants were sacred and not permitted to work, it was a burden to the owner as it would eat up all the owner's money until he/she became destitute.


Business Dictionary: White Elephant
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A useless and troublesome possession that one cannot easily get rid of. Legend has it that rare albino elephants in ancient Siam automatically became the property of the king. At least one such monarch gave a white elephant to any courtier who fell out of favor; the subject was soon ruined by the cost of maintaining this precious gift.

Real Estate Dictionary: White Elephant
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A property that is too expensive to maintain or generates too little rent to pay for itself.
Example: A proposed luxury hotel development in an area not served by air travel is likely to become a white elephant if developed.

Idioms: white elephant
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An unwanted or useless item, as in The cottage at the lake had become a real white elephant--too run down to sell, yet costly to keep up, or Grandma's ornate silver is a white elephant; no one wants it but it's too valuable to discard. This expression comes from a legendary former Siamese custom whereby an albino elephant, considered sacred, could only be owned by the king. The king would bestow such an animal on a subject with whom he was displeased and wait until the high cost of feeding the animal, which could not be slaughtered, ruined the owner. The story was told in England in the 1600s, and in the 1800s the term began to be used figuratively.


Wikipedia: White elephant
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A white elephant in 19th century Thai art.

A white elephant is a valuable possession of which its owner cannot dispose and whose cost (particularly cost of upkeep) is out of proportion to its usefulness or worth.

Contents

Background

The term derives from the sacred white elephants kept by Southeast Asian monarchs in Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. To possess a white elephant was regarded (and is still regarded in Thailand and Burma) as a sign that the monarch reigned with justice and power, and that the kingdom was blessed with peace and prosperity.[1] The tradition derives from tales which associate a white elephant with the birth of Buddha, as his mother was reputed to have dreamed of a white elephant presenting her with a lotus flower, a symbol of wisdom and purity, on the eve of giving birth.[2] Because the animals were considered sacred and laws protected them from labor, receiving a gift of a white elephant from a monarch was simultaneously, both a blessing and a curse: a blessing because the animal was sacred and a sign of the monarch's favour, and a curse because the animal had to be retained and could not be put to much practical use, at least to offset the cost of maintaining it.

The Order of the White Elephant consists of eight grades of medals issued by the government of Thailand. A humorous story concerns a servant at Buckingham Palace on whom a Thai king once announced he was bestowing a "white elephant". The man checked with the London Zoo to see whether they would take it, and was relieved to discover that it was only a decoration.[citation needed]

Examples of alleged white elephant projects

  • The U.S. Navy's Alaska-class cruisers were described as "white elephants" because the "tactical and strategic concepts that inspired them were completely outmoded" by the time they were commissioned – the Japanese heavy cruisers that they were designed to hunt down had already been destroyed.[3]
  • Bristol Brabazon, an airliner built by the Bristol Aeroplane Company in 1949 to fly a large number of passengers on transatlantic routes from England to the United States.[4]
  • Concorde, a supersonic transport built by Aérospatiale and British Aircraft Corporation, intended for high-speed intercontinental passenger travel. Only fourteen production aircraft were built, though it was planned that development costs were to be amortized over hundreds of units:[5] the British and French governments incurred large losses as no aircraft could be sold on commercial terms.[6] Concorde flew the transatlantic route for over two decades, and it did at least make a big operating profit for British Airways.[7]
  • SS Great Eastern, a ship designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. She was the largest ship ever built at the time of her launch in 1858, and had the capacity to carry 4,000 passengers around the world without refuelling, but was not a commercial success. Her hold was later gutted and converted to lay the successful 1865 transatlantic telegraph cable, an impossible task for a smaller vessel.[8]
  • HTMS Chakri Naruebet, a Thai aircraft carrier that has been criticized as having been built for nationalist reasons rather than applicable military uses.
  • Hughes H-4 Hercules (or "Spruce Goose"), often called Howard Hughes' white elephant before and during the Senate War Investigating Committee. Hughes' associate Noah Dietrich called it a "plywood white elephant".[9]
  • Lambert-St. Louis International Airport runway 11/29 was conceived on the basis of traffic projections made in the 1980s and 1990s that warned of impending strains on the airport and the national air traffic system as a result of predicted growth in traffic at the airport.[10] The $1 billion runway expansion was designed in part to allow for simultaneous operations on parallel runways in bad weather. Construction began in 1998, and continued even after traffic at the airport declined following the 9/11 attacks, the purchase of Trans World Airlines by American Airlines in April 2001, and subsequent cuts in flights to the airport by American Airlines in 2003.[11][12] The project required the relocation of seven major roads and the demolition of approximately 2,000 homes in Bridgeton, Missouri.[13][14] Intended to provide superfluous extra capacity for flight operations at the airport, use of the runway is shunned by fuel-conscious pilots and airlines due to its distance from the terminals.[15] Even one of the airport commissioners, John Krekeler, deemed the project a "white elephant".[16]
  • The Millennium Dome in London, built at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds in Greenwich in London to celebrate the millennium, was commonly termed a white elephant.[17][18] The exhibition it initially housed was less successful than hoped and the widely criticised building struggled to find a role after the event. It is now The O2, an arena and entertainment centre.
  • Montréal-Mirabel International Airport is North America's largest airport, but has been abandoned as a passenger airport.[19]
  • New York Giants manager John McGraw referred to the Philadelphia Athletics as a "white elephant" prior to their meeting in the 1905 World Series. Although the Athletics lost that series, in defiance they adopted an elephant as an alternate team logo and eventually as a full-fledged mascot.
  • Olympic Stadium in Montreal cost about C$1.61 billion. Since the departure of the Montreal Expos baseball team in 2004, it has had no main tenant. The debt from the stadium wasn't paid in full until December 2006.[20] Because of the financial disaster in which it left Montreal, it was nicknamed "The Big Owe", "Uh-O", and "The Big Mistake".[citation needed]
  • Osborne House, East Cowes, Isle of Wight, England, was one of Queen Victoria's favourite royal residences. She died there on January 22, 1901. In her will, she asked that it be kept in the Royal Family, but none of her family wanted it, so Edward VII gave Osborne to the nation. With the exception of Princess Louise and Princess Beatrice, who each retained houses on the estate, the rest of the royal family saw Osborne as something of an inaccessible white elephant.
  • The Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea, designed as the world's tallest hotel, began construction in 1987. Due to financial difficulties, construction ceased prematurely in 1992. Since then, the structure has remained as a massive concrete hulk, unfit for habitation.[21] Construction resumed in April 2008.
  • Ada programming language, commissioned by the United States Department of Defense (DoD). It was designed to be a single, standard language, particularly suitable for embedded and real-time systems. The DoD mandated the use of Ada for many software projects in 1987, but removed the requirement in 1997. It is still used in many countries, especially for safety-critical systems such as air traffic control and subways. It came to be known as the "Green Elephant" for the color code used to keep contract selection unbiased. It became irrelevant for commercial applications, barely surviving the wave of new free and successful tools such as C++ and Java.[22]
  • Several incomplete or badly functioning dams, such as the Bujagali dam (Uganda)[23] and Epupa dam (Angola).[24] Most were constructed by foreign companies in the interest of foreign aid.[25] Although the buildings do not meet expectations, if construction is completed or restarted, they could still provide a contribution to the local population.[26]
  • In 1907, author Henry James described the mansions in Newport, Rhode Island as being "white elephants" and "witless dreams" because they were summer homes for the wealthy and were unoccupied for most of the year. Thorstein Veblen invented the term conspicuous consumption to describe the mansions.[27]
  • In "Hills Like White Elephants", a short story by Ernest Hemingway, an unborn child is viewed as a white elephant.

See also

References

  1. ^ Elephants in Thailand: Elephant-National Symbol of Thailand
  2. ^ The Birth of Buddha | The New Kadampa Tradition (NKT)
  3. ^ *Morison, Samuel Loring; Morison, Samuel Eliot; Polmar, Norman (2005). Illustrated Directory of Warships of the World: From 1860 to the Present. ABC-CLIO. pp. 85. ISBN 1851-0-9857-7. 
  4. ^ An Aviation Heritage story
  5. ^ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2003/04/13/do1307.xml
  6. ^ CNN.com - The rise and fall of Concorde - Apr. 10, 2003
  7. ^ BBC NEWS | Business | Why economists don't fly Concorde
  8. ^ Victorian Technology, BBC
  9. ^ Howard Hughes: Hell's Angel By Darwin Porter. Blood Moon Productions, Ltd., 2005 ISBN0974811815 p. 715
  10. ^ "The Expansion Story". http://www.lambert-stlouis.com/e/newwebsite/id261.asp. Retrieved 2007-07-25. 
  11. ^ "Historical Operation Statistics by Class for the Years: 1985-2006". http://www.lambert-stlouis.com/index/about_Facts_oper_stat.html. Retrieved 2007-07-25. 
  12. ^ "New $1 billion runway opens this week, but it's not needed anymore". USAToday.com. 2006-04-11. http://blogs.usatoday.com/sky/2006/04/st_louis.html. Retrieved 2007-07-25. 
  13. ^ "Airport/Mass Transit November 2005 - Feature Story". http://midwest.construction.com/2005/11/01/MC_11_01_2005_p27-01.asp. Retrieved 2007-07-25. 
  14. ^ "Airports and cities: Can they coexist?". http://www.sdearthtimes.com/et0901/et0901s2.html. Retrieved 2007-07-25. 
  15. ^ "St. Louis' airports aren't too loud: They're too quiet". USAToday.com. 2007-01-09. http://www.usatoday.com/money/biztravel/2007-01-09-st-louis-usat_x.htm. Retrieved 2007-07-25. 
  16. ^ St. Louis' airports aren't too loud: They're too quiet - USATODAY.com
  17. ^ When is a white elephant not a white elephant? from Guardian Unlimited: News blog
  18. ^ From Crystal Palace to White Elephant in 150 ... [Mackinac Center for Public Policy]
  19. ^ The New York Times > International > Americas > End of Era Near in Montreal for White-Elephant Airport
  20. ^ CBC News (2006-12-19). "Quebec's Big Owe stadium debt is over". Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/story/2006/12/19/qc-olympicstadium.html. Retrieved 2008-06-25. 
  21. ^ "First Signs of Change in Dour Capital"; Christian Science Monitor, Boston, Mass.: Aug 26, 1992
  22. ^ HLA and the MDA
  23. ^ Bujagali dam as white elephant
  24. ^ Dams as white elephants
  25. ^ Dams as white elephants 2
  26. ^ Continuation of white elephants could still provide some relief
  27. ^ [1]

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Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
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Business Dictionary. Dictionary of Business Terms. Copyright © 2000 by Barron's Educational Series, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Real Estate Dictionary. Dictionary of Real Estate Terms. Copyright © 2004 by Barron's Educational Series, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Idioms. The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer. Copyright © 1997 by The Christine Ammer 1992 Trust. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "White elephant" Read more