The Fool card from the Rider-Waite tarot deck
19 June 2023
Many words have changed their meaning over the centuries, but few so significantly, widely, and often as nice. Today, the word most often means pleasant, good-natured, attractive, and has a positive connotation. (At least in most contexts; describing a potential romantic interest as “nice,” for example, can be damning with faint praise.) But it was not always so.
Nice was brought across the English Channel with the Normans in 1066. It was originally an Anglo-Norman and Old French word meaning silly, simple, and unsophisticated, and it could also be a noun, meaning an ignorant or foolish person. The French word comes from the Latin nescius, meaning ignorant, and it survives today in some regional French dialects as niche. (It’s unrelated to the English word niche, which also comes from French, but later and from a different Latin root.) The Anglo-Norman nice is attested to in 1212, and it took until about 1300 for nice to filter down from the French-speaking nobles to the English-speaking populace.
The earliest known appearance of nice, meaning foolish, appears in the South English Legendary's life of Mary Magdalene, written c.1300:
Tho he hadde that word iseid, his wif bigan to wake,
Of a swume heo schok and braid, and sone bigan awake
And [seide,] "The hende Marie Maudeleyne, heo hath igive me space,
Fram dethe to live heo havez me ibrought thoru hire Loverdes grace.
Heo havez ifed me and mi sone and idon us alle guode;
To seggen it thee hwi scholde ich schone? That yelde hire the Rode!
Heo havez ibeon min houswif, mi mayde and mi norice,
And bote ich thee seide hou heo heold mi lif, for sothe ich were nice.(Though he had said that word, his woman began to wake,
From a swoon she shook and trembled, and soon began to wake
And [said,] “The gracious Mary Magdalene she has given me time,
From death to life she has brought me through her Lord’s grace;
She has fed me and my son and provided us with everything good—
Why should I hesitate to tell you of it? May the cross reward her for it!
She has been my housewife, my maide, and my nursemaid,
And I would be truly foolish not to tell you how she has guarded my life.)
But by the end of the fourteenth century, we see an explosion in the number of senses of nice:
wanton or lascivious (before 1387)
scrupulous or punctilious (c.1387–95)
cowardly (before 1393)
extravagant, ostentations (1395)
strange, extraordinary (c.1395)
lazy, slothful (before 1398)
shy, reluctant (before 1400)
well dressed, elegant (c.1400)
fastidious, fussy (c.1400)
tender, fragile (c.1450)
arcane, intricate, demanding close attention (before 1500)
Most of these senses dropped out of the language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although the fastidious sense is still in use, and that sense has spawned some others:
strict or careful about a particular point (1584)
cultured, associated with polite society (1588)
particular in regard to literary taste (1594)
virtuous, decent (1799)
in good taste, appropriate (1863)
And the arcane, intricate sense can still be seen occasionally, and it too spawned new senses that are in common use today:
of minute difference, slight, small
precise, requiring precision
of the senses, acute
skillful, dexterous
finely discriminative
requiring tact or care
accurate
And by the beginning of the eighteenth century, nice was being used to refer to food that that was especially fine or delicious. By the middle of that century, this sense had generalized to refer to anything that was attractive or pleasant. And by the end of the century, nice was being used to refer to pleasant or agreeable people.
In many of these senses, nice can be used ironically to refer to the opposite. A nice job can be one that was not done well, and Nice one! is often uttered when someone else makes a mistake.
Nice is a rather extreme example of how words can change and acquire new meanings over time. Language is not fixed and is ever changing.
Sources:
Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2017, s.v. nice1, adj. and n.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. nice, adj., nice, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2003, s.v. nice, adj. and adv., nice n.1.
Reames, Sherry L. “Early South English Legendary Life of Mary Magdalen.” Middle English Legends of Women Saints. TEAMS Middle English Text Series. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 2003. lines 486–93. Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 108.
Image credit: Pamela Colman Smith, 1909. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.
