The meaning and origins of ‘staircase wit’

Linguistic inspiration for this column comes from the most unexpected sources. Recently I was enjoying a podcast by comedian Adam Buxton, whose guest, the actor Benedict Cumberbatch, mentioned a wonderful French phrase that I had never heard before.

They were talking about that lightbulb moment – tinged with regret and frustration – which comes a few seconds or minutes after you have left a room or conversation, when your brain comes up with a brilliant bon mot or a response to a question... a little too late.

The phrase, whose original French is also used in English since any direct translation would not do it justice (or sound quite so delightfully evocative), is ‘L’esprit de l’escalier’. 

If you were to translate it, ‘staircase mind’ or, even better, ‘staircase wit’, are perhaps the closest, while ‘afterwit’ is another version.

We have the 18th-Century thinker [Denis] Diderot to thank for the notion, if not the exact phrase itself. 

In his essay, Paradoxe sur le comédien – written in 1773 but only published posthumously in 1830 – he wrote: ‘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, like me, entirely focused on what is being said to him, loses his head and only finds himself again at the bottom of the stairs).

In Diderot’s day, anyone visiting an acquaintance at a mansion or hôtel particulier would converse in the salon on the first floor before descending the stairs to leave – hence the time for one’s lack of quick-wittedness to become apparent.

It is nice to learn an expression for a feeling that we have all experienced.