nice

Let’s start with a riddle-style quiz: what single English word means, or has meant, all of the following:

1. foolish, stupid, senseless
2. wanton, lascivious, ostentatious, neat, elegant, dainty
3. strange, rare, extraordinary
4. slothful, lazy, pampered, delicate, not capable of much endurance, feebleness
5. coy, reserved, shy, reluctant, unwilling
6. fastidious, hard to please, of refined and critical taste
7. requiring great precision
8. inobvious, of slight difference, demanding of close consideration
9. slender, trivial
10. critical, doubtful, risky, requiring tact and discrimination
11. attentive, paying close attention to detail
12. delicately sensitive, finely discriminative
13. showing minute differences, minutely accurate, finely graduated
14. agreeable, pleasant, delightful, commendable, appetizing, friendly, considerate and, ironically very bad, unsatisfactory

And despite all of that, is often accused of meaning nothing at all?

Such is the state of the word nice.

Over time words sometimes come to mean their opposites—bully, for example, used to mean a sweetheart, darling, or good friend, a meaning that we only encounter today in phrases like "bully for you"—but I’d be hard-pressed to think of a word whose meaning has changed as much and as often as "nice."

The evolving meaning of nice can lead to misunderstandings—or incomplete understandings, anyway—particularly when experiencing older works. Shakespeare uses the word nice throughout his plays, sometimes to mean trivial, sometimes to mean delicate or uncertain, but never to mean agreeable or pleasant or any of that constellation of meanings we most often associate with the word now, meanings not recorded until the early 1700s.

In Romeo and Juliet, when Friar Lawrence is unable to deliver the letter to Romeo informing him of the plan for Juliet to fake her death, he says:

Unhappy fortune! By my brotherhood,
The letter was not nice, but full of charge…

Lawrence means the letter was slight but full of import, light, but weighty. And it could hardly have been heavier…Lawrence’s inability to deliver that "nice" letter resulted in Romeo’s needless suicide.

The word nice ultimately goes back to the Latin nescius [NEH-SKEE-US], combining ne- [NEE] (not) and scire- [SKEER-UH] (to know). This became "nice" in Old French and later in English (and "nescience" in English, too, a word for ignorance that no one uses).

The reasons for the extraordinary evolution of the word nice from that point have proven impossible to trace. The OED observes that "in many examples from the 16th and 17th centuries it is difficult to say in what particular sense the writer intended it to be taken." My guess is that this isn’t just a retrospective problem, but indicative of the word being employed in many different ways even then.

"Nice" has such a broad variety of meaning that it becomes maddeningly contextual. When the Dalai Lama says a group was nice, I wish I were in that group; when he says that "nice UN resolutions" are as likely to bring an era of global peace as is waiting for peace to fall from the sky, I’m not as sanguine. I think I’m a pretty nice guy—and I aspire to be more so—but it feels weird to say out loud given the ambiguity of the phrase "nice guy" in our culture…and how painfully I recall the sting of youthful rejections starting with the phrase, "you’re a nice guy, but…"

In fact "nice guy" as a phrase has a long and various history. If asked, young metal-head me would have guessed the popularity of the label stemmed from Alice Cooper’s song "No More Mr. Nice Guy" (which, if true, older less metal-head me would wonder about the song’s other big character Mr. Clean) but the common adage "nice guys finish last" was coined in 1946 by Brooklyn Dodgers manager Leo Durocher who said of the Dodgers’ rivals the New York Giants either that "the nice guys are all over there, in seventh place," or, as Durocher claims in his autobiography, "They’re all nice guys, but they’ll finish last. Nice guys. Finish last."

According to William Safire’s New Political Dictionary, the phrase was popularized, if that’s what you want to call it, in a famous Washington Post interview with President Richard Nixon in which the interviewer asked Nixon about his choices regarding the US action in Vietnam, "When was the moment when, in effect, you said, ‘OK, no more Mr. Nice Guy?’" Safire further theorizes that this popularity might have been the result of macabre joke, popular in the post World War II years which I’ll share on the show’s website for intrepid listeners.

In an aptly less directly confrontational way, we have Minnesota Nice, which has its own Wikipedia entry defining it as "polite friendliness, understatement and an aversion to confrontation and [ironically, in my experience] passive aggressiveness," among other things. There you will also discover that Garrison Keillor, creator of Lake Wobegon, proposed "Wobegonics," the Minnesotan language that has "no confrontational verbs or statements of strong personal preference." Contrast this with Iowa Nice, which also merits its own much shorter Wikipedia entry and which appears to actually mean, well, being nice.

Or maybe I should say "noice?" Or maybe not. "Noice" (drawn out longer the nooiiiiiiicer something is) is fashionable right now, mostly in the form of memes involving Kirsten Bell’s character Eleanor from The Good Place. But this happy replacement for "Niiiiice" (an inflection which makes me question the operation of my inner sarcasm detector) dates back to at least 2003, and is riding a 2nd pop culture high after Key & Peele made it meme-worthy a few years earlier.

All of this—and we haven’t even touched on the even more contemporary spread of the word nice and its meaning, from being happily intoxicated to the South Park fueled, if not coined, 69/nice meme—isn’t leading to any cane-shaking, kids-these-days rants about language change (which is awesome) or inherently dull words (despite the reasonable beginner’s advice to always question the use of words like nice, good luck finding an author who has completely eschewed it).

Instead, I see the long, complex and continuing change of meaning, explicit and implicit, as a delightful example of the beautiful, sinewy, occasionally baffling braid that is language…that awesome human capability it’s so much more fulfilling to bear witness to than berate.