unspoken alligator

The mutually acknowledged but never verbalized understanding in a group that someone is behaving badly — everyone sees it, no one says it out loud, and the offender remains oblivious. Captures the social tension of collective recognition without confrontation.

The betrayal or deception that everyone in a group has quietly clocked but nobody has said out loud yet. Unspoken snake is the open secret of a social circle — the person whose fake behavior is widely sensed but unconfirmed, the elephant in the room that everyone's waiting for someone else to name first. There's a strange tension in an unspoken snake situation: collective awareness with collective silence, until eventually someone says it and the whole group exhales.

An unspoken aggravator is the person in a group who everyone knows is causing tension and drama behind the scenes, but nobody directly confronts or names. They operate through plausible deniability — a well-timed comment here, a strategic absence there, a forwarded message that lands like a grenade — while maintaining enough surface-level innocence that direct confrontation feels risky. The unspoken part is key: the whole group has silently agreed on who the aggravator is, but voicing it would require an uncomfortable reckoning that nobody is quite ready for.