Adventures in Etymology: Episode One, “nice”.

In which the hero, armed only with his trusted guidebook, the Oxford English Dictionary, goes out in search of the skeletal remains of langauge and battles the bogeys of English.

NICE

“I am sure,” cried Catherine, “I did not mean to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should I not call it so?” “Very true,” said Henry, “and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk; and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! It does for everything.”  – Jane Austen, “Northanger Abbey”

I begin this hopefully serial feature with the word “nice” because there is no other word in English the usage of which has changed so drastically in the last 700 years. As one etymologist put it “The sense development has been extraordinary, even for an adjective.” For those of you less familiar with the restrained prose of people who become professional etymologists, this statement is something like a regular person’s yippie-kai-yay mother f$!#er, and jumps off the page with similar abandon/profanity (more on the etymology of profanities in a subsequent episode). What prompts such an outburst is the fact that, over its history, nice has meant nearly opposite things, everything from “wanton” and “lascivious” to its current meaning of “pleasant” or simply “good,” as Catherine uses it above.

Like all good things, nice comes to us from Latin (via Old French), in particular the adjective nescius-“ignorant”, hence its dominant meaning in the 1300s, and for the following 300 years, “foolish” or “stupid”. This is the sense of the word in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (the source for Shakespeare’s homophonously titled play), when Troilus chastises his fellow knights for their foolish infatuation with women:  “O veray fooles, nyce and blynde be ye!“(1.202). And just as Troilus naturally becomes that which he most despises, falling hopelessly in love with Criseyde, so too nice began its dramatic reversal.

By the 15th and 16th centuries, nice could imply not only stupidity, but downright sinfulness, especially of the sexual kind. Thus in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour Lost (1598), the cunning page Moth gives his master advice on how to “betray nice wenches,” that is, how to get loose women to sleep with him. This advice mostly consists of skipping the courtly foreplay and pressing the issue, a practise some friends of mine still swear by.

In the course of these two centuries, the sense of sexual wantonness developed into a broader connection with ostentation, and so nice came to refer particularly to someone who was overdressed. John Harrington’s 1607 translation of Orlando Furioso uses this derogatory sense to describe the women on the enchanted island of the sorceress Alcina:” …nought but courting, dauncing, play and game, /Disguised clothes, each day a sundry fashion,/ No vertuous labour doth this people please, /But nice apparrell, belly-cheare and ease”(6.73, *note to self, use “belly-cheer” at least once today).

This sense of “overdressed” soon became merely, “elegantly dressed”, and inflected a long present secondary meaning of nice, of silly overattention to detail, and evolved into the sense of “Precise or particular in matters of reputation or conduct,” i.e.  especially concerned with  appropriate dress and behavior. This is certainly the longest-lived sense of nice, though nearly obsolete now, but is recognizable from Chaucer right up until P.G. Woodhouse’s 1938 description of Bertram Wooster, who “in his dealings with the opposite sex invariably shows himself a man of the nicest chivalry.”

The shift from this sense to the contemporary ubiquity of “agreeable, pleasant, satisfactory, attractive,” is fairly easy to understand. Much like the term “gentlemen,” which used to refer to a particular class of people, nice simply appeals to its former meaning as a shorthand for anything pleasant or good. The broadening of the word has been seen for a longtime by naysayers as one more piece of evidence of the decline of western civilization, as seen in the Austen quote above and in this hilarious aside from H.W. Fowler’s 1926 A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, with which I shall leave you:

“Nice has been spoilt, like Clever, by its bonnes fortunes; too great a favorite with the ladies, who have charmed out of it all its individuality and converted it into a mere diffuser of vague and mild agreeableness. Everyone who uses it in its more proper senses, which fill most of the spaces given to it in any dictionary, and avoids the modern one that tends to oust them all [here I add an editorial “harumph!”], does a real if small service to the language.”

Until next time, etymologist signing off.

PS, please leave any suggestions for future adventures in the comments section below.