Portelude

portelude (POR-tuh-lood), noun. The small, humbling pause at a familiar door when your hand is already on the handle and your entire body has forgotten which way it opens. You have walked through this door thousands of times. You know the building, the step, the squeak of the hinge. And yet, for one strange half-second, the door becomes a stranger, and you stand there in your coat and scarf, smiling politely at a piece of wood as though waiting to be formally introduced.

The word joins the Latin porta, meaning a gate or door, with prelude, something that happens just before the main event. The word also implies an audience. A portelude endured alone, in an empty corridor, barely counts. The true form requires at least one person standing behind you who has somewhere to be, and ideally someone on the other side of the door, humming, waiting and wondering why the handle is moving but nothing else is happening.

It is not really a failure of memory so much as a failure of nerve. You do know the answer. You have known it for years. But the hand hesitates, and then comes the small indignity of the correction: the push that turns into a pull halfway through, or the confident pull that meets a firm, unyielding door, performed with a bright smile at nobody in particular. Experienced sufferers learn to disguise the moment by pretending to check their pockets for keys they are already holding.

Usage: “She had worked in the building for nine years and still suffered a portelude at the main entrance every single morning, which she had come to regard as the price of admission.” Related forms include liftelude, the pause at a lift when you cannot remember whether you want to go up or down, and the rare but devastating double portelude, in which two people meet at a glass door and each waits for the other to decide.

Behind the joke is something that designers talk about a great deal. The shape of a door handle often tells our hands what to do before our brains have caught up: a flat plate invites a push, while a handle you can wrap your fingers around invites a pull. When a door’s design sends the wrong signal, such as a pull handle on a door that pushes, people hesitate or get it wrong, which is why so many doors end up needing little signs that say PUSH or PULL.

So if you ever find yourself frozen at your own front door, hand on the handle, wondering which way to go, do not worry. You are not losing your mind; you may simply be listening to a handle that is giving you mixed messages. Take a breath, give the door a gentle push, and if nothing happens, try a pull. And if anyone is watching, smile, nod warmly at the door, and walk through as though that was exactly what you meant to do.