Why We’re Rarely Nice about Nice
A brief history of a much-maligned adjective
When we hear the word nice, we are immediately prejudiced against the user. It is a word that has always been seen as ineffectual, weak and bland. Without knowing why, we banish it from our conversations for fear of ridicule, and question the intelligence of those who don’t follow suit. Or at least, we did until recently.
The challenges that have been unprecedented have seen us reach for simple signifiers of comfort. You can’t get more simple than a hashtag to act as a veneer to the grim reality of life. So, like the prodigal word child of Samuel Johnson, nice has had a bit of a makeover and been welcomed back with open arms, as it has become #benice.
#benice is how we show the world who we are. Well, maybe not how we are, but at least how we would like to appear to be. So we lob it on to the end of tweets that may otherwise be thought passive-aggressive at best.
It seems its non-specific positivity has found the perfect time to come back and help us to seem more pleasant to each other.
But why does nice have such a bad reputation? Who made it clear that nice was not nice at all? What better time than now to take a look back at the origins and etymology of nice.
An introduction to nice
Nice is a word everybody knows and kinda likes. It’s like an old friend. Unfortunately, this friend is one that devalues your property as soon as it steps over the door, carrying with it a large overnight bag weighed down with negative connotations and implications.
Having nice around says something a bit like, well, a bit like the Primark outfit says about the guest in the society wedding photo. It doesn’t go unnoticed.
Do you remember who it was that initially told you the bad things about the word nice?
For me, it was Mrs Sullivan. I didn’t know her first name. I still don’t. For all I know, she may not have had a first name. Maybe her first name was just “Mrs”. Though that would be rather unusual.
Mrs Sullivan was my class teacher for Second-Year Infants and then again for First-Year Juniors (now Years 2b and 7a or something with decimal points or something). Generally, these aren’t seen to be the most formative years in childhood but — clearly benefiting from the context of my lack of familial security and my inability to make friends — it was Mrs Sullivan who can take much of the credit for making me the person I am today.
Mrs Sullivan liked me. Sometimes on ‘Drizzle Days’, she would let me stay behind in the classroom instead of having to spend a coatless hour not playing football with the other kids on the sodden school field.
For about a week, I thought that Mrs Sullivan had moved classes for the sole purpose of teaching me again. Perhaps being away from me had proven too difficult for her.
Not difficult because she had a crush on me or anything. That would be weird.
Besides, I think she was a lesbian.
Anyway, Mrs Sullivan. She was nice. Very nice.
Which is ironic really.
Back in those days, I wasn’t very good at painting — not that I am implying Van Gogh tendencies popped up in later life, but I can handle a Crayola. Noticing this, and to avoid me presenting balls of newspaper dripping in flour and water every week we did papier-mache, Mrs Sullivan would sit me on a stool in the corner with the special pencil, and ask me to write a poem instead.
Like, the class would be painting their favourite birds, and I wrote:
“Hey little sparrow, perching on the barrow
I hope you’re not a thief
And you stay on the straight and narrow”
Or, during a class outing to a local park, the class would be making a collage from the twigs. moss and bracken that they collected, and I would sit on the park bench writing:
“I really like those chocolate bars
And the man says ‘Here, take two’
But I say “No sir, thank you”
And I won’t join you in the loo”
One January, Mrs Sullivan was returning my Christmas holiday homework — a poem entitled ‘Christmas Weather, Brrrr’. It had been given a mark of 8 out of 10. Good had been written by the mark.
There was no V before the Good.
I became quite unhappy. This may have been demonstrated by a sudden fit of uncontrollable tears. Obviously, I can’t be sure as it was many years ago.
SIDE NOTE:
It’s worth highlighting that an 8 from Mrs Sullivan was the equivalent to a 9 from most other teachers. That’s not me being over-defensive of my work; she would tell you herself if you asked her. Though I imagine she’s dead by now.
When we had joined her class, she had explained to the hushed group of 20-odd 5 and 6-year-olds that it was her policy not to give full marks to creative work produced by a child. Not because she was cruel, she said, but she was logical. And it was illogical to think that a child of our age group, would have the ability to achieve the level of perfection that full marks required.
I guess she had a point.
In a Dickensian Orphans’ Home sort of way.
END SIDE NOTE
Anyway, as you would expect, I asked for help in understanding why I had lost the one mark. She pointed to a couplet in Verse 2:
“With Christmas comes the snow and ice,
The whiteness makes the world look nice”.
To be fair, it isn’t the most imaginative description and you can see my understanding of poetic structure was firmly based on AABA or AABB. But neither of these facts had impacted the mark.
It was the use of nice.
Nice was a word without meaning, as Mrs Sullivan called it. If a writer used nice, she told me, it was a sign that they possessed a low vocabulary and pitiful IQ.
She didn’t use the word ‘stupid’. But she did say it was the sort of word she would expect to see Mikey Lashmore use. He was good at sports. And at making farting noises under his armpit.
What she didn’t tell me was the reason for the weakness of this adjective. How the assignations we give it today are the result of a twisty-turny journey the word has had since it was popularised in the English language.
She didn’t mention that changes in the societal structure had seen nice fly from meaning to meaning, positive and negative, until it had landed, rather unsure of itself, where it is today.
Being cruel to be nice
Nice was first appropriated in English in the 14th century (via the French) from its Latin origin nescius, meaning ‘ignorant’ or ‘not aware’.
Originally, the English used it at this most basic derivation. ‘Unaware of things’. ‘Not intelligent’. ‘Stupid’. If it was 1320 and someone called you nice, you’d probably be too much of a dumbass to care.
In the 15th century, we delved a bit more into the original definition and ‘lack of awareness’ took prevalence over ‘lack of knowledge’. With the extreme divisions of wealth in the country at this time, the working classes saw the upper classes as having no awareness of the “real world”. So, the insult became that the upper classes were nice in the sense of being nice but dim.
This specificity to class, led to nice taking on a broader meaning over time, encompassing other characteristics seen in this social group. Nice became the catch-all term to conjure an image of the decadent, effete and fussy mannerisms of the simpering classes (the sort often played by Hugh Laurie in any series of BlackAdder).
Perhaps disinclined to argue, the victims of the insults didn’t care a tiddlybob what the hoi polloi thought. Instead of running from the words, as often happens, they reclaimed nice as their own. The proof points above remained largely the same, but they were interpreted as aspirational rather than derisory.
Ugly decadence became an expensive luxury. An effete manner was a flirtatious coyness. Fussiness showed an abundance of good taste. Behaviours that were mocked became signifiers of success. Affected mannerisms representative of a class and financial standing that others coveted.
Suddenly, people wanted to be nice.
Which is where it landed. One minute stupid, the next insulting, then a sort of compliment but of middling ground. With this as its ‘teenage years’, it grew up to be the positive-but-not-that-positive-and-a-bit-bland-really general compliment that we have been taught to avoid from childhood.
Does #benice mean anything at all?
It’s likely you remember being told to avoid writing nice when writing something meaningful. You may have been told by your own Mrs Sullivan.
My Mrs Sullivan may have been imbibed in the spirit of my grammar checking programme which has had a meltdown due to the repetition of nice in this piece.
But you may not have known its etymology. The chances are that when you see nice being used, you may well cast judgment on the writer rather than paying attention to its intent.
Think about it. Would you buy an outfit from a shop because it advertised nice clothes? Consider the bank offering a nice loan? Go to dinner at a restaurant cooking nice meals?
Possibly, but you’d likely be thinking “bless the rather dim people offering that. They need all the support they can get with such meagre intelligence to survive on”.
Which wouldn’t be very nice now, would it?
And its appropriation in a hashtag is a somewhat glib attempt to show qualities in ourselves without really having to, you know, be very nice at all.
1 Extra Word writes copy and develops content that humanises businesses to thank, help, reward — and generally flirt with — their customers, prospects and employees. Whatever your brief, if you think people should enjoy your emails, socialise your social posts and have fun with your FAQs, visit 1ExtraWord.com.
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This is an updated version of an article that was originally published at https://www.1extraword.com on May 29, 2020.
