Etymology is great sport, especially when it’s nice and silly, and I have a couple of words for you today that really are nice and silly.
I insist on accuracy in etymology, partly because just-so stories fill people’s heads with asinine ideas about words and humans in general (people are asinine enough without the assistance of fabrication), but partly because the truth is often weirder than anything some twit could invent. Today, though, I’m giving you a story of why being ignorant can be nice, and why being good can be silly. And it shows the hazards of being too fixated on what a word originally meant.
We all know and love the word nice. Some of us use it about 69 times a day. We know that it means ‘agreeable’ or ‘virtuous’ or ‘pleasant’ or ‘inoffensive’ or ‘absolutely not naughty’. But like many a nice person or thing, it has a shady history.
Nice is a pretty bland word now, but we still see uses like “a nice distinction” that show an earlier sense of ‘accurate, attentive to details, even finicky’, and we might notice that some older uses of “nice” also mean ‘dainty’ and ‘delicate’. But wait—there’s more.
Nice went through a phase of often being used to mean ‘skillful’ and ‘meticulous’, and that came from a sense meaning ‘minute, subtle’, which could also shade into ‘obscure’ or ‘trivial’ or even ‘coy’. That sense came from a sense meaning ‘delicate’ or ‘fragile’ or ‘timid’. But there was also a usage, in the same general time period (which, at this point, was before Shakespeare), of ‘lascivious’ or ‘wanton’ or ‘ostentatious’. Sometimes in historical examples it’s kind of hard to know exactly which sense of “nice” the writer had in mind. Which is pretty… nice.
But when you go all the way back, the earliest sense comes directly from the Latin that evolved, through French, into nice: nescius… which meant ‘ignorant’. From ne (‘not’) and scius (from scio ‘I know’). So nice, when it first showed up in English in the 1300s, meant ‘ignorant’ or ‘foolish’ or ‘silly’.
Except, at the time, silly didn’t mean ‘silly’.
Now, I should say that silly didn’t show up in English until the 1400s. So it didn’t exist when nice came in. But that’s just because before silly was silly it was, since the 1200s, seely (or sely). However, it didn’t mean ‘giddy, inane, foolish’ until the mid-1500s. Silly came to that sense from a sense meaning ‘simple, rustic, unsophisticated’, but that sense also appeared in the 1500s. Before that, it meant ‘weak, innocent, defenceless’. And that’s about how it was when it was first silly rather than seely. But seely, now…
Well, at the time that nice (or nyce or nys or however those silly people wanted to write it) first landed in English, seely meant ‘insignificant’ or ‘poor’ or ‘weak’, and that in turn came from ‘pitiable, miserable’, which came from ‘innocent, harmless’. And that came from a sense of ‘pious’ or ‘holy’ or ‘blissful’ or ‘lucky’ or ‘blessed’, which came from Proto-West Germanic *sālīg, the descendants of which have generally kept that sense in other languages: German selig, Dutch zalig, Swedish and Danish salig, Scots seelie.
So, to put it loosely, silly originally meant a very nice state of being, and nice originally meant a very silly state of being.
Fortunately, some of us think it’s nice to be silly (though it’s not at all silly to be nice). But you can also see that etymology is not destiny; the origins of words—and other things—are not proper guides to their current state. So when someone tells you that a certain word has to mean exactly what its origins or distant historical use reveal, just tell them they’re very silly and not at all nice. If they’re offended, they’ve proved your point; if they’re not, well, you meant it the modern way anyway.
Sesquiotica 