Nice Work

If someone in the 1300s had called you nice, you’d have had good reason to be offended.

Nice comes from the Latin nescius, “not knowing”: ne-, not, plus scire, to know. Scire also gives us science, so nice and science began as opposites, the ignorant and the knowing. The word came into English through Old French, where nice meant careless, clumsy, simple or stupid. When English first borrowed it in the late 1200s, it meant foolish, ignorant and senseless.

Then it went on one of the longest journeys of any word in the language.

Over the next couple of centuries, nice drifted from foolish to timid, then to fussy and hard to please. From fussy it moved to dainty and delicate, and from there to precise and careful. That’s the sense still hiding in “a nice distinction”, or “nice and early”. By 1769 it had reached agreeable and pleasant, and by the 1830s, kind and thoughtful.

From foolish to fussy to precise to pleasant, over about five hundred years. No single step was strange. Each meaning sat next to the one before. But stand at either end and you’d never guess the two were related.

And just as it arrived, people started complaining about it. In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, published in 1817, Henry Tilney teases Catherine Morland for calling a book “nice”. It’s a very nice word indeed, he says. It does for everything. Two hundred years later, English teachers are still writing “find a better word than nice” in the margins.

That’s the part with a lesson for business. Once a word means everything, it means nothing. Nice travelled so far it ended up as the vaguest word of approval in English. Plenty of business vocabulary has made the same trip faster. Innovative, strategic, robust, world-class and solutions all started with a precise meaning. Overuse wore them smooth, and now they slide past without leaving a mark.

The fix is the one Tilney was hinting at. If something was pleasant, say how. Instead of “nice presentation”, try “your third slide changed my mind about the budget”. Instead of “a nice result”, say “up 12 per cent on last quarter”. The specific version is the one people remember, believe and repeat.

So the next time you’re about to write nice, remember where it started. It meant someone who didn’t know what they were talking about. Use a word that shows you do.