nice == ignorant?
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nyce, nice, nys, from Old French nice, niche, nisce (“simple, foolish, ignorant”), from Latin nescius (“ignorant, not knowing”); compare nesciō (“to know not, be ignorant of”), from ne (“not”) + sciō (“to know”).
From The Taming of the Shrew, Act III, scene i:
Old fashions please me best, I am not so nice
To charge true rules for old inuentions.
KeithB said,
December 26, 2025 @ 10:00 pm
I always found it interesting that "Blessing" comes from "Blood"
DCBob said,
December 26, 2025 @ 10:02 pm
And thus, our current president is the nicest ever ….
Barbara Phillips Long said,
December 27, 2025 @ 1:09 am
Link to joke I heard around 1990, which has colored my view of "nice" ever since:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/6ly03s/thats_nice/
Cedar said,
December 27, 2025 @ 2:11 pm
The sense of "ignorant" for "nice" tracks for me, when I hear West Coast elite use the phrase "Midwest nice".
And on these occasions, "Midwest nice" ostensibly just means "rather noticeably nice".
But I always sense a twinge of the implied ignorance. The implication might not even be understood by the speaker.
Cuconnacht said,
December 27, 2025 @ 3:57 pm
If Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey had been aware of the etymology, perhaps he would have insisted that "nice" should only be used to mean "ignorant":
'But now really, do not you think Udolpho the nicest book in the world?'
'The nicest – by which I suppose you mean the neatest. That must depend upon the binding.'
'Henry,' said Miss Tilney, 'you are very impertinent. Miss Morland, he is treating you exactly as he does his sister. He is forever finding fault with me, for some incorrectness of language, and now he is taking the same liberty with you. The word 'nicest,' as you used it, did not suit him; and you had better change it as soon as you can, or we shall be overpowered with Johnson and Blair all the rest of the way.'
'I am sure,' cried Catherine, 'I did not mean to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should not I call it so?'
'Very true,' said Henry, 'and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! It does for everything. Originally perhaps it was applied only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement – people were nice in their dress, in their sentiments, or their choice. But now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word.'
'While, in fact,' cried his sister, 'it ought only to be applied to you, without any commendation at all. You are more nice than wise. Come, Miss Morland, let us leave him to meditate over our faults in the utmost propriety of diction, while we praise Udolpho in whatever terms we like best.
Brett Altschul said,
December 27, 2025 @ 6:56 pm
@Cuconnacht: Northanger Abbey is a dreadful book. The fact that the author also wrote some brilliant novels should not blind us to the fact that that particular book is terrible.
Peter Grubtal said,
December 28, 2025 @ 5:28 am
The taming of the shrew quotation : isn't that in the sense of subtle or fastidious?
Had the sense of "ignorant" survived from the middle English period?
AntC said,
December 28, 2025 @ 6:03 am
==
BTW, is this doubled-equals <a href="https://wiki.c2.com/?CeeLanguage"CeeLanguage creeping in? Real Programmers use single `=` for that, and `:=` (or back-arrow) for assignment.
Peter Grubtal said,
December 28, 2025 @ 8:53 am
AntC :
Oh dear, Perl programmers excluded from the community!
Philip Taylor said,
December 28, 2025 @ 9:32 am
Well, having cut my programming teeth on Algol 68 (a language I use to this day), I would most certainly agree that "Real Programmers use single '=' for that, and ':=' (or back-arrow) for assignment"; but why the U+0060 : GRAVE ACCENTs around '=' and ':=' ? Surely they should be U+0027 : APOSTROPHE {single quote; APL quote}s, for exactly the same reason, should they not ?
AntC said,
December 28, 2025 @ 3:27 pm
why the U+0060 : GRAVE ACCENTs
Because in many web editors, backticks are what you use to surround code, so it's formatted in fixed width typewriter font. Experiment here
typewriter font = :=Algol 68, Perl, hah! Johnny-come-latelys. Algol 60 and BCPL is what I use.
(And apologies for mucking up my HTML in the earlier message. I'm surprised it even appeared, let alone that the link works.)
Chas Belov said,
December 28, 2025 @ 3:54 pm
Hilarious to see programming arguments being brought into this thread.
¿So we are going to treat computer languages as superior to one another as we claim human languages are equal? I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader as to whether human languages are single-equal-sign equal or double-equal-sign equal. I think it is safe to say human languages are not triple-equal-sign equal.
I miss COBOL.
Chas Belov said,
December 28, 2025 @ 3:55 pm
For the record, I cut my programming teeth on IBM Assembler.
J.W. Brewer said,
December 28, 2025 @ 5:57 pm
It is if nothing else polite to treat all natural languages that have arisen in any human society as equal. But artificial "languages" deliberately created to be useful tools in some practical endeavor may fairly be compared to other tools invented for the same purpose and judged better or worse for that purpose without being impolite. Of course, it is often the case that practical endeavors are sufficiently varied and complex that different tools are best adapted to different specialized sorts of tasks within a given broader field of human activity, and that the optimal number of computer languages is thus significantly more than 1.
AntC said,
December 28, 2025 @ 7:47 pm
¿So we are going to treat computer languages as superior to one another as we claim human languages are equal?
@JWB's high-minded apologetics notwithstanding, peevers gonna peeve. Wadler's Law
[Phil Wadler is sorta known to LLog: Geoff Pullum has been on various committees with him at Edinburgh.]
Scott Mauldin said,
December 29, 2025 @ 12:29 am
As the French say, "heureux les simples d'esprit" as well as (less politely) "trop bon, trop con". The French really have a deep cultural prejudice against being nice and happy.
Philip Taylor said,
December 29, 2025 @ 4:47 am
And I have a friend in Bodmin (Cornwall, south-west England), Chas, who in his retirement is making a very good living as a Cobol consultant, there being few if any competitors ! And for Ant, yes, Algol 60 was my first language (taught at the Borough Polytechnic, London, by none other than David Singmaster of Rubik's Cube fame) and I too used BCPL (do you remember the "global vector") but once I was introduced to Algol 68 by Michael Bill and David Till (collectively known by the computer science contingent at Westfield College, London as "BILL: STRUCTURED WITH REAL LETTER B, REAL LETTER I, REAL LETTER L, REAL LETTER L" I knew I had found perfection and need never again search for a better language (I was programming in Clary 404 assembler at the time). Which did not stop me, of course, from programming in Fortran when required, and later specialising in VAX/VMS assembler. But when, a couple of years ago, I needed to write code for scheduling bowls matches, Algol 68 was the perfect choice. I have never programmed in C, and have wish ever to do so. But knowing that ChatGPT uses Python behind the scenes, although I do not like the language ("Indentation should never be semantically significant"), I may have to familiarise myself with it.
With sincere apologies to all readers who are interested in human language but not computer languages.
Yves Rehbein said,
December 29, 2025 @ 4:10 pm
I may be COBOL ignorant, but the topic was not "niche". You missed nice by the breadth of a h.
". . . from Old French niche, from nicher (“to make a nest”) (modern French nicher), from Vulgar Latin *nīdicāre, from Latin nīdus (“nest”)." https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nidus#Latin returning to the habit of quoting Wiktionary URLs in full because that's them rules: "Real Programmers" don't "write" code https://xkcd.com/378/ they write standards https://xkcd.com/927/
If I wonder if PIE *nisdós "nest" is possibly related to nice, from Latin nescius, *skey-, this is only to safe face. Maybe *skey- compares favorably to noscō, *ǵn̥h₃sḱéti, *ǵn̥eh₃-. An internal derivation of that of the like of *ni "down" + *sed- "sit" to *nisd- would be very much desirable, is all can say at the moment.
Yves Rehbein said,
December 29, 2025 @ 4:17 pm
I mean, in conclusion, English use of nice just has to be ultra conservati, if your smack talk is relevant and the jab at the French may be chiefly ignored.
At least Python has its equality operator right, if well it has a lisp.
David Marjanović said,
December 31, 2025 @ 2:36 pm
the inchoative suffix *-sḱé-? I'll have to disappoint you there.
A distant relationship between the negation *ne and "down", *ni-, is imaginable, but not terribly testable.
Chas Belov said,
January 2, 2026 @ 1:13 pm
For the record, I am not a COBOL consultant and haven't touched it in years. But it's been unfairly dissed; it's totally the appropriate language for accounting programs.