L'esprit de l'escalier

MICROPOLITAN DIARY

Dear Diary,

Although I have many times experienced the frustration of thinking of the perfect thing to say when it's too late to say it, I only recently learned, while doing a New York Times crossword puzzle, that the phenomenon has a name: "staircase wit," or in French, l'esprit de l'escalier. Maybe knowing the name has empowered me to avoid the predicament, because last week I think I managed to come up with quite the perfect thing to say in an awkward situation. I was introduced to a person of some importance in state government as the writer of "a very read blog." The person looked confused, and, in a moment of amazing wit, I rejected my first partisan impulse to say, "Actually, it's a very blue blog," in favor of clarifying the homophone, "That's r-e-A-d."

"Micropolitan Diary" is Gossips' homage to and blatant imitation of "Metropolitan Diary" in the New York Times. The term micropolitan was coined (by Gossips) because Hudson is a metropolis in microcosm.
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