nice

Nice began life nowhere near a compliment. Latin nescius meant “not knowing,” built from ne, “not,” and scīre, “to know”—so an early nice person was ignorant, foolish, or simply not very sharp. French carried the word into English in the thirteenth century, where its meanings wandered through “timid,” “fussy,” “delicate,” and “precise” before settling into everyday pleasantness. Jane Austen spotted the problem in 1803: in Northanger Abbey, a character jokes that nice is “a very nice word indeed” because it can apparently describe everything. Its knowing half has more respectable relatives: science, conscience, and prescient all preserve echoes of the same Latin knowledge-word. Remember nice as a semantic chameleon: once “not knowing,” it eventually became the safest compliment in the English language.