L'esprit de l'escalier

This name for the phenomenon comes from French encyclopedist and philosopher Denis Diderot's description of such a situation in his Paradoxe sur le comédien ("Paradox on the Comedian").[2] 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, "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" ("the sensitive man, such as myself, overwhelmed by the argument levelled against him, becomes confused and [can only think clearly again when he] finds himself at the bottom of the stairs").

In this case, "the bottom of the stairs" refers to the architecture of the kind of hôtel particulier or mansion to which Diderot had been invited. In such houses, the reception rooms were on the étage noble, one floor above the ground floor.[3] To have reached the bottom of the stairs means to have definitively left the gathering.

English speakers sometimes call this "escalator wit", or "staircase wit".[4] Afterwit is a synonym, with forewit as its antonym.

The Yiddish trepverter ("staircase words")[5] and the German loan translation Treppenwitz (when used in an English language context) express the same idea as l'esprit de l'escalier. However, in contemporary German Treppenwitz has an additional meaning: It refers to events or facts that seem to contradict their own background or context.[6] The frequently used phrase Treppenwitz der Weltgeschichte ("staircase joke of world history") derives from the title of a book by that name by William Lewis Hertslet[7] (1882; much expanded 1895) and means "a paradox of history".[8]

• Comic timing
• Epimetheus (mythology)
• "The Comeback" (Seinfeld)

• The dictionary definition of l'esprit de l'escalier at Wiktionary