L'esprit de l'escalier or L'esprit d'escalier (literally, staircase wit) is a French term used in English that describes the predicament of thinking of the right comeback too late.
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This name for the phenomenon comes from French encyclopedist and philosopher Denis Diderot's description of such a situation in his Paradoxe sur le comédien.[1] During a dinner at the home of statesman Jacques Necker, a remark was made to Diderot which left him speechless at the time, because, he explains, "l’homme sensible, comme moi, tout entier à ce qu’on lui objecte, perd la tête et ne se retrouve qu’au bas de l’escalier" ("a sensitive man, such as myself, overwhelmed by the argument levelled against him, becomes confused and can only think clearly again [when he reaches] the bottom of the stairs"). In this case, “the bottom of the stairs” refers to the architecture of the kind of hôtel particulier or mansion Diderot had been invited to. In such houses, the reception rooms were located on the étage noble, the noble story, one floor above the ground floor,[2] so that to have reached the bottom of the stairs means to have definitively left the gathering in question.
Diderot's fellow-philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau also recognised his own affliction with l’esprit de l’escalier. In his autobiographical book Confessions he blamed such social blunders and missed opportunities for turning him into a misanthrope, and reassured himself that he was better at "conversations by mail".
American English speakers sometimes also call this "elevator wit". [3]
Hey Rosetta! has a song called "Esprit D'escalier," which indicates the feeling of this regret throughout.
The Seinfeld episode "The Comeback" revolves around this phenomenon. The character George Costanza comes up with what he believes is the perfect comeback to an insulting remark made by a former coworker, and he goes to great lengths to recreate the situation so that he may ultimately use the comeback.
Chuck Palahniuk uses the term in his novel "Haunted."
Tim Minchin defines it, and gives an example of its use in his "Ready For This?" show.
The German loan translation Treppenwitz (when used in an English language context[4]) express the same idea as l'esprit de l'escalier. However, Treppenwitz in contemporary German has a different meaning: It refers to events or facts that seem to contradict their own background or context. The frequently used phrase "Treppenwitz der Weltgeschichte" ("staircase joke of world history") derives from the title of a book of that name by W. Lewis Hertslet[5] and means "a paradox of history".[6][7]