L’esprit de l’escalier (Staircase Wit) June 23, 2010
Have you ever found yourself walking away from a social interaction, and the perfect comment/compliment/response dawns on you after the fact?
Perhaps someone insulted you, or maybe you were chatting up someone of the opposite sex. Your response to an unexpected insult or compliment was a little less than witty, and you don’t think of something satisfactory to say until after the fact… I think that this happens to all of us every now and then. I’ve never spent a significant amount of time dwelling on these situations, but they can leave you with a slight feeling of regret.
Did you know that there is a name for this phenomenon? I was poking around on Wikipedia, when I came across an entry for “L’esprit de l’escalier”, or “staircase wit”.
This name for the phenomenon comes from French encyclopedist Denis Diderot’s description of such a situation in his Paradoxe sur le comédien. During a dinner at the home of statesman Jacques Necker, a remark was made to him 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 like me, overwhelmed by the argument levelled against him, becomes confused and can only think clearly again [when he gets to] the bottom of the stairs.
Anyway, I thought that was pretty interesting.