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Patrick • 10/08/04 • 1:49 PM:

Apparently, the French call this esprit d’ escalier. One of my students, Josh Wise, found this out for me.

Patrick • 10/08/04 • 5:37 PM:

This same student of mine has found references to the word as “trepverter” instead of the spelling Peart gave it. Anybody want to read Bellow’s book Herzog to find out definitively? Google seems to point to this “trepverter” spelling.

Patrick • 10/23/04 • 12:10 PM:

In spite of the awesome power of “New Word Syndrome” to bring new words into your life in bundles, I doubted I’d really come across trepverter unless I read Saul Bellow’s Herzog. And I didn’t. But I did come across l’esprit de l’escalier (which I’d spelled slightly wrong in the above comment)! Oh glorious life! Here it is, from Louis Menand’s Introduction to this year’s Best American Essays anthology:

Writers are people in whom l’esprit de l’escalier is a recurrent experience: they are always thinking of the perfect riposte when the moment for saying it has already passed. So they wait a few years and put it in print.

Patrick • 12/19/04 • 2:30 AM:

I’ve come across the word again (in its French form) while snooping around on Snopes.com, where they begin a segment on Neil Armstrong’s famous moon-landing words with:

English has no handy term for what the French call esprit de l’escalier, and the Germans know as treppenwitz: the “wit of the staircase,” those clever remarks or cutting rejoinders that only come to mind once it’s too late for us to deliver them—literally, as we’re headed down the stairs and out of the house. English also lacks an expression to describe the antithesis of treppenwitz, those occasions when one has a perfect remark carefully prepared in advance but fails to deliver it properly.

So what’s with Armstrong’s quote? He omitted the article a before “man,” which messes with the literal meaning of his quote. From a newspaper article of the day, quoted on Snopes:

When Mr. Armstrong saw the quotation—“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”—in the mission transcript after his return to earth, he said he was misquoted, it was reported yesterday.

There should have been the article “a” before “man,” the astronaut said.

The “a” apparently went unheard and unrecorded in the transmission because of static, a spokesman for the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston said today in a telephone interview.

Yeah, right, Neil.

Patrick • 12/19/04 • 4:06 PM:

The Snopes people must love this word (or at least the German version, which is similar to the Yiddish, as you might expect). Here it is again on a page talking about some Mark Twain attributed quotes that he apparently never said:

Searches of Twain’s writings, both his publications and his private letters, fail to locate this witticism. The closest resemblance to it appears in an 1879 letter in which Twain quoted a wag who, when asked if he’d ever seen such a cold winter, replied, “Yes, last summer.” Twain then added his own comment, “I judge he spent his summer in Paris.” (Twain’s rejoinder is an example of treppenwitz—the wit of the stairway, those brilliant comebacks one thinks of only long after the moment has passed.)

Note, too, that the “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” quote (which Dad has referenced) was used by Twain in his autobiography, but he attributed it to Benjamin Disraeli.

Hey, do I win the award for the most self-comments (uninterrupted comments on my own entry)?

Dad • 12/19/04 • 4:29 PM:

Go ahead, give it to yourself.

Shulamith Berger • 01/19/05 • 7:21 PM:

According to iBiblio, (see “Subject: The retort too late”):

More, although certainly not the final word, on “the retort too late.” In Saul Bellow’s novel Herzog, the main character states: “… in the Yiddish of his long-dead mother, trepverter - words that came too late, when you were already on your way down the stairs.”

David • 03/31/09 • 12:53 PM:

I just used this post. Thank you Pat, and thank you Maddenation. Whooo! A buddy of mine was talking about an incident the other day and how he should’ve said … So maybe not the wisdom of the stairway, but close enough.

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