Staircase Wit, Diderot and this Blog.

Staircase Wit, Diderot and this Blog.

Well, my dear visitor, thank you so much for passing by!

This is the first post of many that, I hope you enjoy as I do while putting it together.

 The title: L'esprit de l'escalier it's a french term that literally translate to Staircase wit  and was coined by  French  encyclopedist and philosopher Denis Diderot  in his essay Paradoxe sur le comédien.

According to my beloved and priceless Wikipedia, during a dinner at the home of statesman,  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 levelled against him, becomes confused and can only think clearly again [when he reaches] the bottom of the stairs"). In this case, “the bottom of the stairs” refers to the architecture of the kind of  mansion to which Diderot had been invited. In such houses, the reception rooms were located one floor above the ground floor, so that to have reached the bottom of the stairs means to have definitively left the gathering in question...

In other words, L'esprit de l'escalier is the act of thinking of a response argument or clever comeback when is too late to deliver it. The phrase can be use to describe a riposte to an insult or any witty remark that comes too late to be useful, after one has left the scene of the encounter.Long explanation but I think you got the idea my dear reader.