How often do you use the word nice'I have no idea how many times I physically utter the word nice in a single day, but Id guess its a lot. I do know that if I search Slack ' the messaging app millennial office drones use to talk about work things and decidedly not-work things ' for recent instances of the word nice in my channels, I get 2,034 results.My colleagues and I have used the word nice to describe or comment on the following: an idyllic island off the coast of Korea, a picture of a huge asteroid hitting Earth, Chers Twitter account, someones decision to grab coffee, Lady Gaga singing Born This Way to children in foster care, and a carefully placed photo of Donald Trump snarling.Nice, nice, nice, nice, nice and nice.So: How can one word serve as the appropriate response to both impending doom and caffeine breaks' According to lexicon history, nice has led an erratic existence. Over the years, nice has meant everything from lewd to coy to kind. Oxford Dictionaries cruises through the meandering history of the wordon its blog.The word nice, Oxford claims, has pretty negative roots in the Latin nescius, meaningignorant. But it really took off in the 14th century as a term for something foolish or silly. The negative connotations ballooned from there. Nice was used to refer to a variety of less-than-great sentiments including wantonness, extravagance, ostentation, lasciviousness, cowardice and sloth. Like, Teobaldus, your fear of the Black Plague is nice.Dive deeper into the Middle Ages, and the meaning deflated. The word started to hint not at ostentation or cowardice but shyness and reserve; not in a negative way, but certainly not yet positively. Lets call it neutral. Like, Baignards goat is nice.Folks in the 17th and 18th centuries, though, they loved modesty. (Just consider the clothes.)And as a result, nice began to take on a more positive tone. As Oxford points out, nice started to connote respectability and virtue, refined taste and polite mannerisms. Like, Cornelias lofty neckline and bulbous skirt are nice. Merriam-Webster, another fine purveyor of diction, provides a few examples of past (and considerably different) usages on its blog:May we not this day read our sin in our punishment' O what nice and wanton appetites, what curious and itching ears, had thy people in the dayes of plenty' 'John Flavel, Husbandry Spiritualized, 1674But Reddy Wheeler knew Daisy. We were properly introduced. It was quite all right! Yes, but nice girls dont do this sort of thing, you know'unchaperoned, and so late at night, and all that. 'Fred Jackson, Young Blood, Munseys Magazine, 1917Okay, lets let Dictionary.com weigh in, too. On its blog, a writer points out that by the 19th century, use of the word nice was not only loaded with a history of confusing meanings, it was also so ubiquitously tossed about Jane Eyre had to pen a quippy bit of dialogue about it.In 1817sNorthanger Abbey, character Henry Tilney gently chastises Catherine Morland for her overuse of the word:And this is a very nice day; and we are taking a very nice walk; and you are two very nice young ladies, he jests. Oh, it is a very nice word, indeed! It does for everything. Fast forward to today, and nice is still everywhere.It is the tardigrade of words.Nice guys. Nice moves. Nice memes. Nice weather. Sure, nice tends to mean kind, pleasing, polite and friendly, but it can also still mean something along the lines of socially acceptable or even harmless. Toss a too in front of it, and nice resembles its earlier definitions: ostentatious or extravagant. Pop an I guess after it, and nice sounds like a full-fledged neg(a complimentary word that actually serves as an insult). Elongate the i in it, and niiice becomes a knee-jerk response of an adverb like OK.Basically, the meaninglessness of nice is just as confusing as ever. We seem to use the word whenever we dont know what else to say. Because, well, it works.Linguistic prescriptivists or persnickety elementary school teachers would disagree. Theyd attribute the words multitude of definitions to lazy deployment.Why say someone or something is nicewhen you can be more specific' A man isnt just nice,hes polite in social settings. The water at the beach isnt just nice, its crystal clear and temperate. A burning rock headed straight for our planet isnt nice at all, its a harbinger of inevitable death.But descriptivists would recognize the utility of having such a nimble and ambiguous word, if, for nothing else, save the fact that it provides room for great jokes. Why is it funny to respond to apocalyptic scenarios with the chill AF response nice' The same reason its funny to react to any instance of the number 69 with a cool and concise nice.The U.S. has 69 treaties with other countries where we would have to defend them and their borders. How nice, but what do we get' NOT ENOUGH Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 28, 2016 .@realDonaldTrump nice Gideon Resnick (@GideonResnick) May 28, 2016 What makes us laugh' researchers asked in a very real article in the Journal of Neuroscience. One crucial component of many jokes is the disambiguation of words with multiple meanings.In the case of 69 jokes ' and youd be dead lying if you said they werent amusing ' the disambiguation is simple. You have to say nice,Brian Feldman wrote for Select/All.That is shorthand for You and I' We both know about sex. Congratulations to us on our base-level sexual knowledge.Sixty-ninejokes work particularly well on the internet, a platform that allows us to communicate in short spurts of text, to reply to a scenario with a gif, with an emoji, or with the tried-and-true utterance: nice.So the next time you move to type the blessed, historic word in Slack, do so with pride. Dont let nice naysayers convince you the overused word is meaningless. Because nice, my friends, is nice. -- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
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