The right comeback too late

While sitting at table seven at Acidman's wedding on Saturday evening, Jono and I were discussing the name of my blog (he happens to think that it's a brilliant name - thanks Jono).

It occured to me that not many people may know what "esprit de l'escalier" means or how I decided on it. So I've taken it upon myself, with the help of Wikipedia of course, to give you a little explanation about what it really means and how it came about.

As you may (or may not) know, the direct translation of "esprit de l'escalier" is "Wit of the Staircase", Wiki describes it as:

"thinking of the right comeback too late"

Which is exactly what it is.

The story was "Originally a witticism of Diderot, the French encyclopedist, in his Paradoxe sur le Comédien. This combination of words was first used in order to describe a situation when a person offended by somebody at a party just grumbled instead of giving a proper, defending answer, getting, as a result, in even more silly position and thus being "forced" to leave the party; and here it comes the "stairs" word - while the annoyed was going down the stairs that "brilliant" answer just poped-up in his mind, nevertheless it was too late."

I find myself in this situation on a regular basis but never knew there was a name for it. When I started my blog, I obviously had to create some sort of name (and I'm terrible at creating names). My usual thing when naming is to just grab a super, ultra huge Oxford dictionary, open random pages, scan the results and decide whether I like it or not. I ran across "esprit" first and liked it but needed more. So I checked the other options down the page and found "esprit de l'escalier" and that's how I discovered the words.

posted by Candice @ 5:19 PM