L’esprit de l’escalier

Borges, discussing translations of The Thousand and One Nights, prefers the Spanish adjective milyunanochesco to milyunaochero (“too Argentine”) and milyunanocturno (“overly variant”). It’s more than tempting to imagine that Borges made up all three in order to prefer one over the others. In any case, when someone asked me about the years I had spent between one meeting and another, that liquid phase between first thinking I might want to stop drinking and knowing I had to, I wish I’d had milyunanochesco – “thousand-and-one-nights-esque” – on hand.