“Oh! it is a very nice word indeed! — It does for every thing.”
We already knew that Henry Tilney was profound. It’s nice pleasant when the rest of the world notices, however.
The last 10 years have been a “nice” decade, according to Bank of England governor Mervyn King.
He was of course using the word in an acronymous and strictly economic sense, a shortening of Non-Inflationary Consistent Expansion.
Oh, dear. We suspect Mr. Tilney would not approve.
That ambivalence is reflected in the origin of the word itself. Look in the Concise Oxford Dictionary and you see “pleasant, agreeable, satisfactory” and “(of a person) kind, good natured”. Look in the concise’s big brother, the Oxford English Dictionary, and you see an avalanche of meaning.
Dr Philip Durkin, principal etymologist for the OED, describes “nice” as having “one of the most complicated semantic histories in English”.
It’s a word that has come to mean almost the exact opposite of its first usage 700 years ago. Derived from early French, it originally meant “foolish” or “silly”.
Soon, it came to mean “wanton” or “dissolute”, mutating by stages to “showy” or “ostentatious”, and thence to “finely dressed” or “elegant”, then precise (as in “a nice distinction”) to “refined” and finally “respectable” or “decent”.
Now, says Dr Durkin, the meaning of “nice” has become maddeningly woolly: “It is a catch-all word,” he says.
There’s a telling bit of humour in Jane Austen when the Northanger Abbey character Henry Tilney ruminates on the word.
“It is a very nice word indeed,” he says. “It does for everything… now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word.”
No, he doesn’t approve. 
May 24th, 2008 at 3:02 am
Interesting.