Fiction Is Contagious

IN FRENCH THERE EXISTS A WONDERFULLY PICTURESQUE idiomatic expression: avoir l'esprit de l'escalier. It literally means to have a mentality which in English, of course, means absolutely nothing. What the expression really means is this: when you have a stairwell mentality, you can never think of the thing you should have said during an important verbal exchange or in a heated argument. Stairway mentality people are those who only think of what they should have said after they've left the room where the exchange occurred, and are on the stairway out towards the door

History · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis