white elephant
a highly unprofitable project
TRANSLATION
white elephant = das Millionengrab, die Fehlinvestition, nutzloser Gegenstand, hohe Kosten verursachender Besitz --- GOOGLE INDEX white elephant: approximately 6,300,000 Google hits
STATISTICS
IN THE PRESS
Energy policy. Britain should cancel its nuclear WHITE ELEPHANT and spend the billions on making renewables work.
The Economist
The Economist
Did you
know?
white elephant
noun phrase
- something that has cost a lot of money but has no useful purpose
(Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary)
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A white elephant is an idiom for a valuable, but useless object that the owner cannot dispose of. Common examples are office buildings that are empty or under-occupied, shopping malls that fail to attract retailers and/or customers and costly stadiums operated by unsuccessful sports teams.
The term derives from the sacred white elephants kept by monarchs in some southeast Asian countries. The tradition derives from tales which associate a white elephant with the birth of the 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.
There was a time when monarchs occasionally gave white elephants as gifts. But because they were considered sacred and were protected from performing labour, for the recipients they were simultaneously a blessing and a curse since they could not be put to practical use. They looked good, but served no real purpose and cost a lot of money to maintain.
The Millennium Dome in London, which cost of hundreds of millions of pounds to build, was commonly termed a white elephant. 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.
(source: Wikipedia)
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SMUGGLE OWAD into today's conversation
"Lots of technology companies built costly headquarters buildings during the dot-com boom that ended up being white elephants."
noun phrase
- something that has cost a lot of money but has no useful purpose
(Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary)
---
A white elephant is an idiom for a valuable, but useless object that the owner cannot dispose of. Common examples are office buildings that are empty or under-occupied, shopping malls that fail to attract retailers and/or customers and costly stadiums operated by unsuccessful sports teams.
The term derives from the sacred white elephants kept by monarchs in some southeast Asian countries. The tradition derives from tales which associate a white elephant with the birth of the 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.
There was a time when monarchs occasionally gave white elephants as gifts. But because they were considered sacred and were protected from performing labour, for the recipients they were simultaneously a blessing and a curse since they could not be put to practical use. They looked good, but served no real purpose and cost a lot of money to maintain.
The Millennium Dome in London, which cost of hundreds of millions of pounds to build, was commonly termed a white elephant. 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.
(source: Wikipedia)
---
SMUGGLE OWAD into today's conversation
"Lots of technology companies built costly headquarters buildings during the dot-com boom that ended up being white elephants."
