Must Be Nice

NICE: adj. giving pleasure or joy, good and enjoyable; kind, polite, and friendly

History:

The Oxford English Dictionary offers 42 definitions for nice. The earliest sentence, dating from around 1300, appears in the South English Legendary, a compilation of saints' lives in verse form. It illustrates the definition, "foolish, silly, simple; ignorant." The second entry offers the definition, "displaying foolishness or silliness; absurd, senseless." In an example drawn from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, nys is translated "insane" by Simon Armitage. The definitions developed a wide range over time, including "encouraging lasciviousness," "ostentatious," "elegant," "precise," "refined," "strict," "respectable," "unmanly," "lazy," "strange," "shy," "subtle," "dexterous," and "full of risk." Most recently, the word has taken on the sense of "agreeable, pleasant, satisfactory." Merriam-Webster's definition, "kind, polite, and friendly," reveals that the word has, essentially, traveled from "ignorant" to "thoughtful." Though the OED includes many obsolete definitions, the multiplicity of meanings is almost staggering, to the point that it has become a word with no substantial meaning. In 1817, Jane Austen illustrated its condition well in Northanger Abbey: "'I am sure,' cried Catherine, 'I did not mean to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should not I 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.'"

Etymology:

English derived this wide-ranging adjective from the Old French nice, meaning "careless, clumsy; weak; poor, needy; simple, stupid, silly, foolish." Even in the twelfth century the word had a range of apparently unrelated meanings, though all carried negative slants, despite the more limited meaning of its Latin original, nescius, meaning "ignorant, unaware." Its parts, the Latin prefix ne- ("not") and the base scire ("to know"), yield the simple etymological definition, "not knowing."

Effect:

The excessive and often vague use of nice prompted H. W. Fowler, in 1926, to declare the word "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." Though Fowler seems to blame women for the demise of nice into meaninglessness, men must accept their share of responsibility. They have often been known to use the word to describe everything from a car to a piece of furniture to a blind date in order to avoid making a meaningful statement. When C. S. Lewis devised the N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments) in his novel That Hideous Strength, he may well have had Fowler's idea of "vague and mild agreeableness" in mind. The organization, bent on dominating England, if not the world, is in no way kind, polite, or friendly either to the population in general or even to its own employees. Though the acronym is meant to deceive those outside the organization, the reader quickly perceives the nefariousness of the N.I.C.E. A careful reading of the novel reveals the aptness of many definitions of nice over the centuries, including "foolish," "lascivious," "strict," "unmanly," "strange," "subtle," and "full of risk." The N.I.C.E. means to imply pleasant agreeableness but disguises something most unpleasantly disagreeable.

The challenge for us today is not to be nice so much as to be genuinely good. We do well to remember the words attributed to the late Dr. Horace Hummel, a professor at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis: "The Christian Church is more than merely a collection of nice people telling each other how nice it is to be nice."