Nice of You to Join Us

The original meaning of nice

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0:33From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm Bob Garfield with Mike Volo, and today's episode, I'm afraid, is simultaneously nice and not very nice at all. Hey, Mikey. Hey, Bobby. How you doing? Splendid. Thank you and your own self. I'm great. I'm great. You know, that paradox you described about today's word, it's actually spot on. Nice and not particularly nice at the same time.

1:05Schrodinger's episode. Nice. Well, thank you. Nice of you to say. You're welcome. I'd like to begin... And very nice to hear. Good. I want to be... Super nice. I want to begin with a question. What do you think, Bob, was the original meaning of nice back in the 1300s when it came into English? Can you glean any clue at all from either the word itself or from your intuition?

1:36As I often do, I can rely only on... What do you call these things? A wild-ass guess. But, you know, I have this sense that it has to do with something that fits properly, that operates, that is well-designed or by accident leads to a positive outcome. I'm often impressed with your wild guesses, but this time you are wide of the mark.

2:06No shock to anyone. All right. I'll give you an example of it in context from about 700 years ago and see if you can figure it out. There's a poem from the 1300s in Middle English called William and the Werewolf. It's about a Spanish prince who is turned into a wolf. The wolf kidnaps the son of the king of Sicily, raises him in the woods. The kid grows up to become a servant to the daughter of the Roman emperor, and the two fall in love. It's basically how my grandparents

2:37met, to be honest. My paternal grandfather was, by all accounts, raised by wolves. Okay, so at one point, this daughter of the Roman emperor, she's upset with herself for having fallen in love with her servant. But she thinks about it and says, I am without a doubt unwise and exceedingly nice to so unkindly and harshly blame my own heart. So what does she mean by nice?

3:07Oh, I see. So like she's stupid? She's obtuse? Yeah. Nice meant foolish or ignorant. But hold the thought. There's another word in English. It's not very common, but you find it in test prep and vocabulary building books. You come across it once in a while in a magazine. I'll give you an example of it from the Independent newspaper in England from the year 2000. The author refers to George W. Bush as the, quote, smirking and

3:39nescient scion of the most mediocre political dynasty in American history. I've never heard of nescient. Just never. Okay, so N-E-S-C-I-E-N-T. Like prescient or sentient, but not. But not. Different word. So if you look at the word, it's ne, which is Latin for know or not, plus science, which is Latin for knowledge. So nescient means ignorant, literally not knowing, right?

4:13Nice is a compact version of nescient. It's basically what happens to Latin when the French get a hold of it. Got it. And we've discussed that before on this show, how whole sounds disappear when a Latinate becomes a French word. Yeah. So we took nice or nice from the French in the 1300s, as evidenced in that Billy and the Wolfman poem or whatever it's called. Now, at some point, nice started to take on sexually

4:50suggestive overtones. So you see in the 15 and 1600s phrases like nice lust or overcome with nice pleasures, a nice and wanton appetite. In Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost, a character talks about how men can use certain tricks or wiles to seduce nice wenches. A wench just meant a woman at that time, but a nice wench was a woman who was...

5:21Dumb blonde. Perhaps receptive or open to being seduced. In other words, nice now started to mean lascivious.

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Shift to positive traits

6:56Around the same time, nice could also mean showy or flamboyant, and this was said mostly about clothing. So two phrases that pop up again and again are a nice array or nice apparel, both meaning either elegant or even extravagant with regard to someone's attire, right? The way they dress. Overly conspicuous, ostentatious. Exactly, exactly. Now, if you open this Schrodinger's box

7:35of nice, if I can reach back for that metaphor again, at any given point in the history of the word, you may get ignorant or lascivious or ostentatious, as you put it, or any of 15 or 20 other shades of meaning that are attributed to nice in the history of that word. It could mean scrupulous, having a nice conscience. It could mean fastidious. Whoa! So it's gone from generally negative characteristics to pretty positive traits.

8:08Right, right. Could mean fastidious, being nice about cleanliness. It could mean refined or cultured, having nice habits or a nice accent are phrases that you come across. It could mean dainty or effeminate when talking about a man. It could mean delicate or fragile. That was sometimes said of plants. It could mean subtle, as in a nice distinction. Virtuous, as in a nice girl. Proper, shy, neat, precise, on and on. So it means basically everything. Yeah.

8:39Including foolish, satisfactory, kind, and sexually available. Some of which are kind of contradictory. Correct. A better question would be, what hasn't nice meant over the years? Now, of course, many of these senses are completely obsolete. Many are so rare that you might never encounter them, and many of them overlap so that if you did encounter them, you might not even know it, right? So the precursor to the Oxford English Dictionary back in 1906, it said that in many examples of the word

9:16nice from the 15 and 1600s, quote, it is difficult to say in what particular sense the writer intended nice to be taken. In other words, it was often not clear because it could mean so many things. And not because it was used sarcastically or hyperbolically or ironically. It's just that it meant all of these different things. Yeah, that does sound confusing. You know, one might almost say it defeats the purpose of words. Right. Okay. So what about the nice that we think of today?

Becoming an anodyne compliment

9:54How would you define that? Pleasant, kind, mild. Yeah. Sweet. Meeting the bare minimum standard of satisfactory, a word you might use as a catch-all for when you don't have anything either extremely negative or extremely positive to say, right? It's nice. The conventional wisdom is that this sense took hold in the mid-1700s, and it became so common so quickly that it largely subsumed the dozen or

10:28more nuanced meanings and became this general anodyne complement that could be applied to anything or anyone. And for that reason, the word started to get on people's nerves even back then. How do we know this? Jane Austen. Northanger Abbey was published posthumously in 1818, one of Austen's novels, but it was almost entirely written in 1798, 1799, when Austen was incredibly in her early 20s.

11:05All you need to know is that a character named Catherine is talking about a novel she read and really enjoyed. It's a real novel, actually. It's called The Mysteries of Udolpho by Anne Radcliffe, and Catherine refers to it as the nicest book in the world. Another character named Henry makes fun of her use of the word nice, and he says, quote, This is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies.

11:40Oh, it is a very nice word indeed. It does for everything. Originally, perhaps, it was applied only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement. People were nice in their dress, in their sentiments, or their choice, but now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word. Now, in an almost eerie example of life-imitating art, or I guess art-imitating art,

12:11as it were, here is the late great comedian George Carlin riffing on the word nice in precisely the same spirit as Henry from Northanger Abbey, if not precisely the same language. I know what it is that bothers me about that whole thing. It's the word nice. It's just a weak word. Doesn't have a lot of character, you know. Nice. Isn't he nice? Oh, he is so nice. And she's nice,

12:44too. Isn't that nice? How nice they are. I don't care for that, you know. So that's Jane Austen, 180 years later. Deeper voice. Yeah, yeah. And I just love that Jane Austen and George Carlin, two very different people, both satirized the word nice in completely different centuries. Mm-hmm. And yet, yet, nice, as this anodyne expression for slightly more than satisfactory,

13:21persists. Yes. And I want to bring up one more use of the word nice, because you said earlier that it wasn't used ironically. The new LinkedIn hiring pro can't undo your last hire, the no-show. Who set you back because they didn't show up on day one, or day two, or ever again. And now your product launch is delayed because you're talking to alien abduction podcasters to track them down. But LinkedIn hiring pro can help make sure your next hire sticks. In fact, businesses who use LinkedIn are 24% less likely to reopen a

13:53role in the next 12 months. Hire right the first time with LinkedIn hiring pro. Post a free job today at linkedin.com slash quality.

Nice as an ironic intensifier

14:00There is a use of nice as a kind of intensifier in the phrase nice and X. If you come in from outside on a cold day, you might say, it's nice and warm in here, or nice and toasty. Here's a clip from the big Lebowski when the sheriff of Malibu is telling off the dude. We got a nice, quiet little beach community here, and I aim to keep it nice and quiet. So let me make something plain. I don't like you sucking around bothering our citizens, Lebowski.

14:35I don't like your jerk-off name. I don't like your jerk-off face. I don't like your jerk-off behavior. And I don't like you jerk-off.

14:46All right. I let that run long because it's so good. Okay. But you hear the sheriff use the phrase nice and quiet. Here's a clip from the Iron Man movie when Tony Stark is testing out his flight suit. All right. Nice and easy. Seriously. Just going to start off with 1% thrust capacity. In 3, 2, 1... Again, you hear Tony use the phrase, this time, nice and easy.

15:19First, the use of nice in this way dates to the 1790s, as far as we can tell, which is right at the time when nice was becoming so ubiquitous that a character in a Jane Austen novel would make fun of it. But notice also that the thing that nice is intensifying is usually good, right? It's something desirable, nice and warm, nice and quiet, nice and easy. But not always.

15:50Sometimes the nice and X phrase is used ironically with something not so desirable. I think that's where the word really shines. That's where it kind of breaks out of its anodyne shackles and becomes something more than just a nice word. You know, I'm trying to think of what you're about to say. And as you framed the construction, I'm really struggling. You know, I'm going, nice and infectious? No.

16:21Nice and catastrophic? That's not going to be it. What are these phrases? I'll give you an example. Back when Doc Rivers was coach of the LA Clippers in the NBA, there was a player named Matt Barnes who was recovering from strep throat. And Doc Rivers said, jokingly, I believe, that he would have Barnes rub against Kevin Durant in the playoffs to get Durant nice and sick. Oh, yeah. Okay, so a few years ago, Sarah Jessica Parker was photographed in New York City

16:57during the filming of that Sex and the City follow-up show called And Just Like That. She was dressed as her character, Carrie Bradshaw, and holding a pigeon. This went viral because why was she holding a pigeon? The pigeon was a handbag in the form of a pigeon made by the designer J.W. Anderson. You can currently, I checked, you can currently buy the pigeon clutch, as it's called, from Nordstrom for $960.

17:33One heroic fashion website at the time called the bag, quote, Nice and Ugly. My favorite example of this use of nice is from Keith Richards, talking about the Rolling Stones song Little TNA from the early 1980s, which is about what it sounds like it's about. Keith Richards later said of the song, which he wrote, by the way, and sings lead vocals on, he said it was, quote, Nice and dumb, which is what it's supposed to be.

18:05So, the first list of phrases you came up with, nice was an intensifier, but so are these. These are intensifiers of not something that's satisfactory or pleasant, but the opposite. So, the word started, nice did, meaning foolish or ignorant or nescient, not knowing. Then it was a kind of Swiss Army knife of words that applied to basically everything under the sun.

18:37Then it flipped to mean satisfactory and vaguely good, but not quite wonderful. But in this usage, it does actually become ironic. Not in the sense that when a baseball player drops the ball and runs score, you go, oh, you're in a nice defense. It's not that sort of irony. It's something more subtle. Yeah, it's like a positive intensifier of a negative thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Whereupon the whole becomes less pleasant than the sum of its parts.

19:12That is nicely said. Lexicon Valley is produced by Livia Bloom Ingram. Who is very nice and does nice work. Not the nice in the not nice way, nice and wonderful. Yeah, scrupulous and fastidious and kind and precise. All right, Mike, are we done here? We are nice and done. Later, Gator.

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