Foreign Phrase of the Day: L’Esprit de L’Escalier

There are words or phrases we need to borrow from other languages.  From French, that phrase of the day is “L’esprit de l’escalier”.  “L’esprit de l’escalier” literally means “the staircase mind”.  This is a French term, used in English, about thinking of the perfect retort too late, or after the fact. 

The name for this predicament comes from French encyclopaedist and philosopher, Denis Diderot, from his description of such a situation in his Paradoxe sur le Comédien, “Paradox on the Comedian”.  It is said that during a dinner at the home of Jacques Necker, finance minister to Louis XVI, someone made a remark about Diderot.  It left him speechless in indignation because, as he explained, “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 finds himself at the bottom of the stairs”.  Here, “the bottom of the stairs” refers to the architecture of the kind of mansion Diderot had been invited to.  In such houses, the reception rooms were on the étage noble, one floor above the ground floor.  To have reached the bottom of the stairs means to have definitively left the gathering.