Sugar Spice and Everything Nice

“Nice”. “Nice movie”. “Nice Guy”.

The last one, I got as a compliment the other day and if the person who gave it to me is reading this blog, it meant a lot. It did.

“Nice”… amazing word isn’t it. Tells you that the thing is good. mmm.....“good”? is that what “nice” tells you? Naah. Its like saying that you like something without getting over the top, without saying that its good or anywhere close to being that. Its just an in-betweener.

Thanks to the person who brought it to light (actually I would need to thank more than one). These "nice" people are never wrong, always there, kind, reciprocating etc. etc. etc. Counter intuitive but these are also the people who find it the most difficult to make it to the wish-lists. Accept it or not, people so charming, kind and selfless generate a bit of self loathing among the lesser of God's creations. These are the kind of people that one can hardly relate to. May be they keep reminding of how selfish, ignorant everyone else is. They all come under the banner: “Nice”. So its right (and I hope its not), nice people do end up last.

May be that’s why the word makes me cringe. Nobody would ever bother to know this but this has got to be the word I hate the most.

And now i think about it. How can such a sweet, harmless, unintimidating word as “nice” bring me to my desktop and make me type. There is nothing very particularly wrong with word so am I really too twisted in my mind.

I did a bit of digging to know the history of the word and this is what I got:

“Nice”. The word we use to mean “pleasant” was actually not a very nice word at all!

Way back in the beginning, the Romans had a word for it -- "nescius," which in Latin means "not knowing" or, more bluntly, "ignorant." The French turned "nescius" into "nice," and used it to mean "stupid or simpleminded," and it was this sense that was first carried into English. But by the fourteenth century "nice" had acquired another meaning, that of "wanton or lascivious" i.e. “driven by lust or luxury”.

In the 15th century, "nice" swung in the other direction and was used to mean "shy" or "refined," and by the 16th century the word had been narrowed down to mean "fastidious or tasteful." We still use this sense as "a nice touch" or "a nice distinction."

Our modern use of "nice" to mean "pleasant" dates only from the middle of the 18th century, and was remarkably controversial for many years. It was only in 1934, in fact, that lexicographers at Merriam-Webster stopped labelling this use as "colloquial" in their dictionaries, which I suppose was very nice of them.

Nice isn’t it.