"elusive idea" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You could use it in a sentence like: The professor was trying to explain the elusive idea to the students.
The museum's newly opened Design Triennial takes the elusive idea of "beauty" as its theme – a topic contemporary criticism too often shies away from.
It gradually becomes clear that what's really at the center of the circle is a complex, elusive idea of blackness, as insistent in its invisibility as the troubled lives implied by liquor bottles and toys, and the stripped, walked-over bodies evoked by the discarded clothes.
Good teaching, be it art or science, seems to be an elusive idea for most of the professors I ve encountered in graduate school.
"Historical trajectory" is an elusive idea.
Beyond financial comfort, even practical dreams of education and savings remain an elusive idea for many nonwhite Americans.
Long before the selfie became too ubiquitous for its own good, the self-portrait reigned supreme, the ultimate way to artistically explore the ever-perplexing and elusive idea of self.
These are ambitious and elusive ideas for a picture – or a series – to contain, and in many ways I think McConnell is grappling with the limits of photography, or even the impossibility of photography.
In answering this question, the authors engage Nietzsche's most elusive ideas, his exhortation that individuals strive to become more themselves (Be all that they can be, in the words of the United States Army's advertising slogan), by learning to love their fates ("Amor fati") and embracing what he called "eternal recurrence".
And even more elusive ideas crept in.
It was a great foundation for discipline, hard work and, unfortunately, the ever-elusive idea of perfection.
I couldn't disagree more with Neal Gabler ("The Elusive Big Idea," Sunday Review, Aug. 14).
