Esprit de plum

Esprit de Plum ("Spirit of the Pen") is a term coined by author Christopher Arbor and filmmaker Ethan Hunter to describe the phenomenon of misremembering and effectively--but unintentionally--rewriting previously told stories (derived from film, television, novels, comic books etc.) to make them far better than they actually are or were.

Origin:

Arbor and Hunter, who became friends in college, would tell one another about stories they had read or seen before, recapping the events and quoting lines of dialogue. But upon actually re-experiencing these stories would discover that they had reworked the story and even invented dialogue that never existed. Somewhere between, for example, seeing a movie and telling their friend about it they had revised the film to be much better. They encountered this phenomenon often enough that they decided it should have a name and so they created the term “Esprit de Plum.”

“I haven't the foggiest clue why we gave it a French name,” Hunter once said. “I guess we just thought it sounded appropriate or maybe just classier. Neither of us actually speaks French.”

Arbor related the origin of the term as follows, “The first time we noticed it was when Ethan recounted to me this one issue of Batman with clarity that can only be described as eidetic. The premise of the issue was that The Dark Knight was dealing with exposure to Scarecrow's fear gas. Ethan was able to make it sound as psychologically complex as a Dostoevsky novel. Months later when he dug the issue out of his mom's basement it seemed to have the literary quality of toilet paper."

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