L'esprit de l'escalier or (, ,"esprit de l'escalier" (US) and ; ) is a French term used in English for the predicament of thinking of the perfect reply too late.
Origin
This name for the phenomenon comes from French encyclopedist and philosopher Denis Diderot's description of such a situation in his " ("Paradox of the Actor").Paradoxe sur le comédien, 1773, remanié en 1778; Diderot II, Classiques Larousse 1934, p. 56 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, "a sensitive man, such as myself, overwhelmed by the argument leveled against him, becomes confused and doesn't come to himself again until at the bottom of the stairs" (").
In this case, "the bottom of the stairs" refers to the architecture of the kind of or mansion to which Diderot had been invited. In such houses, the reception rooms were on the , one floor above the ground floor. To have reached the bottom of the stairs means to have definitively left the gathering.
In other languages English speakers sometimes call this "escalator wit" or "staircase wit". An older English term that was sometimes used for this meaning is afterwit; it is used, for example, in James Joyce's Ulysses (Chapter 9).
The Yiddish and the German loan translation express the same idea as . However, in contemporary German has an additional meaning: it refers to events or facts that seem to contradict their own background or context.Treppenwitz, DUDEN – Das große Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache in zehn Bänden, Mannheim 2000. "Bedeutung: Vorfall, der wie ein schlechter Scherz wirkt." [Meaning: event which looks like a bad joke] The frequently used phrase , , derives from the title of a book by that name by (1882; much expanded 1895) and means or . Langenscheidts Großes Schulwörterbuch Deutsch-Englisch, Berlin, München 1977
In Russian, the notion is close to the native Russian saying .
In Chinese, a close equivalent is , referring to remarks or actions that come too late to be useful.
See also "The Comeback" (Seinfeld) Comic timing Epimetheus Hindsight
References
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