A term coined in French, L’esprit de l’escalier, is afterwit, or the witty remarks thought of after having descended stairs. The Wikipedia article does a great job of detailing the origin of the story, including a reference to “the bottom of the stairs” which indicates a guest has fully left a gathering.

Witty or remarkable, our ability to reflect upon things allows us to speak greater on that topic. It is why skilled conversationalists carry conversations with their charisma, because conversations are rhythmic and the best don’t drop a beat.

Typically writers experience this phenomenon the most, as collecting and organizing thoughts can become an instrumental task to their expression. I’ve sometimes thought of this as introversion and the extraversion, but charisma comes to both spectrums. The life of the party may not be the speaker of the party and the person least engaged may have the most to say.

The term Spirit of the Escalator resonates with us because we have been in dialogues where we couldn’t properly reply and we thought of a reply afterwards. We appreciate its French origin because we like to think of ourselves as witty and cunning. The spirit captures but one element of conversational reflection, that element being comeback.

As our conversations take shorter and shorter forms, the desire for sharper and snappier comebacks increases. With more accessible conversations that have become narrower in digital spaces, from lack of intonation to lack of context, we have allowed conversation to boil down to bullet points and sound bites, thereby increasing the need for comebacks. Nuanced conversation, with give and take, becomes less attractive to traditional broadcasts day by day.

Now there is an equilibrium, where an opposite and equal reaction manifests at a critical point. When our distaste for short form content becomes too great, we gravitate towards long form content. Of course, these long form content creators will produce smaller pieces of their own content, indicating a self-awareness and sense of ownership towards sub-content. But the major draw of long form content is the ability to reintroduce long conversation, without the conversation turning into a martial art of offense and defense, of maneuvering around sound bites.

The term Spirit of the Escalator carries a modern invention’s name in it. Sure, I could be taking the translation too literally, with any set of stairs mechanical or not considered to be “l’escalier.” I wonder if the term’s genesis comes from a different age of conversation. When conversation was once communal, it now has became guarded in ivory towers with both speakers and audience on the defensive. It is remarkable the internet has recreated these ivory towers in some ways, in the form of closed communities and echo chambers, while the internet has also opened doors by removing gatekeeping and allowing different forms of conversation to be tested in the market.

It will be truly interesting to see what terms we’ll be using to describe texting or leaving a zoom call. Hell, we can’t even slam phones anymore. Our technology shapes our responses and sometimes the responses we’ve learned become phased out entirely. What will be our next Spirit of the Escalator?