Sunday Word: Esprit de l'escalier
esprit de l'escalier [es-pree duh le-skahl-yey]
noun:
a perfect comeback or witty remark that one frustratingly comes up with only when the moment for doing so has passed
Examples:
Your esprit de l'escalier doesn't kick in until you're well out the door. (Lauren Collins, Sally Rooney Gets in Your Head, The New Yorker, December 2018)
Here's an unhappy truth about using language. Every minute of your life feels like l'esprit de l'escalier: replaying in your mind the too-late retort. (Nan Z Da, Language After the Fact: Rey Chow's 'Not Like a Native Speaker', Los Angeles Review of Books, June 2016)
Ox-eyed as Odysseus but sulky as Achilles, he crabbily voiced his complaints with the flame-grilling phrases that come to most of us in l'esprit de l'escalier (and sometimes did to him). (Robert Potts, My country or a deadline, The Guardian, September 1998)
She eventually went to sleep, but about a half-hour later I thought of the perfect thing to say. The French have a word for this. "L'esprit de l'escalier," the spirit of the stairway, where you think of the right thing to say just a little too late. (Brian Watanabe, A review of 'Inside Out' by a 4-year-old, The Guardian, July 2015)
I too responded to this banquet of niceness, when not adhering to my professional skepticism. But as I left the movie theater, I had my own little l'esprit de l'escalier. The film left me feeling simultaneously amused and used. (Richard Corliss, About Time: Richard Curtis' Love, Repeatedly, TIME, October 2013)
(click to enlarge)
Origin:
The still very foreign phrase esprit de l'escalier first appears in English in one of the remarkable, not to say idiosyncratic, let alone cranky books by the Fowler brothers, F W (Francis George) and H W (Henry George), The King's English (1906): "No one will know what spirit of the staircase is who is not already familiar with esprit d'escalier." The French phrase was coined by the French philosopher and encyclopedist Denis Diderot in his Paradoxe sur le comédien (1773-77), a dramatic essay or dialogue between two actors: "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, entirely overcome by the objection made against him, loses his head and can only recover his wits at the bottom of the staircase), that is, after he has left the gathering. (Dictionary.com)
Though well known in French, it seems to have begun to appear in English writing only at the beginning of the twentieth century. Apart from a reference to it by the brothers Fowler in 1906, the first recorded use in English is in Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1911), but in a wittily inverted sense that shows the author expected his readers to understand and appreciate the reference: "What ought he to have said? He prayed, as he followed the victorious young woman downstairs, that l'esprit de l'escalier might befall him. Alas, it did not." (World Wide Words)