nice

For most of its career, nice was anything but nice. In late-thirteenth-century England, calling someone nice meant calling them foolish, ignorant, or even senseless—a verbal slap rather than a compliment. The word came through Old French from Latin nescius, literally “not-knowing”: ne meant “not,” while the same knowing stem found in science supplied the rest. Then it wandered through “timid,” “fussy,” “dainty,” and “precise” before arriving at “agreeable” around 1769 and “kind” by 1830. Jane Austen captured the word’s wonderfully vague new life in Northanger Abbey (1803), where “nice” can praise a book, a day, a walk, and two young ladies almost in one breath. Remember it as a semantic time traveler: today’s nice person began as someone who simply didn’t know.