Just to clarify, that’s nice as in mice, not Nice as in Côte d’Azur, in case you’re still in holiday mode. Although, since we acquired the word from the French, there’s bound to be a link somewhere between Nice and nice. I’m told Nice is very nice at this time of year and, let’s face it, if you can name a seaside town Littlehaven, why wouldn’t you name one Nice?
One of the most prolific words in the English language, nice is hard to avoid – especially when you regularly email your friend Nige and autocorrect doesn’t have any friends called Nige. Yet it’s also one of the most derided and in defending it (for that is my purpose today) I feel like Atticus Finch outside the jail in Maycomb.
Hands up anyone who remembers being told at school not to use the word ‘nice’ and to try to come up with something more imaginative.
I said, “Hands up,” Smithers!
“Nice is too bland,” they said, “too generic. Think of something more evocative, more descriptive.” And so we were encouraged to trawl the oceanic trench of vocabulary, where strange adjectives lurk, with bizarre, glowing appendages for enticing the unwary to their doom; hideous, misshapen adjectives that only see the light of day when dragged to the surface in some eager-to-impress student’s dissertation or a re-run of After Dark.
Adjectives like concomitant.
If you don’t know what it means, look it up – then forget it. You’ll never need it. The first time I encountered the word ‘concomitant’ was when I was sent an article by someone who had recently graduated and was keen to enlighten the world with his theories on the catenaccio system. You might think I’m talking about complex mathematical theory; this was an article for a football fanzine called The Shankill Skinhead.
Catenaccio was the Italian defensive system of strangling the life out of opponents – literally in some cases – which had proven successful for a few years and was deemed by students of the game in the late 80s to be somewhat more sophisticated than the traditional English tactic of kicking anything that got in your way as hard as you could up in the air.
Call me an ignoramus, but I didn’t think readers of The Shankill Skinhead wanted to be subjected to words like concomitant. This was back in the days when you could stroll onto the Stretford End at five to three for £2.50, eat a pie and relieve yourself into a rolled up newspaper. There was no place for intellectualising about Norman Whiteside’s id, even in the broadsheets. So I threw the metaphorical angler fish back into the sea and replaced it with a sprat. United equalised through an outrageous own goal by Ronnie Whelan of all people and we all had fish for tea. Happy days.
I never came across the word concomitant again, but it stuck in my mind as a prime example of what can go wrong when you go fishing for adjectives in deep waters. If you want your readers to understand you, and not feel like you’re trying to belittle them by using words the’ve never come across before, it often pays to cast your line in shallower seas.
Which brings me back to the word ‘nice’. Such a versatile word, so stuffed with meanings, one minute sincere, the next sarcastic, it is the cornerstone of countless works of art, from Borat to The Fast Show to Santa Claus Is Coming To Town. Even Dylan Thomas made good use of the word:
“When one burns one’s bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.”
Imagine if they’d told Brian Wilson to find a more imaginative adjective. Wouldn’t It Be Pleasant doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it? Or Billy Idol… Favourable Day for a White Wedding? You can probably come up with your own. It’s when you apply it to song lyrics that the essential problem with “finding a more imaginative word than nice” emerges: almost invariably it involves adding syllables.
A quick scan of thesaurus.com (other online thesauruses are available) gives us 45 synonyms for nice, of which a mere five are monosyllabic: fair, fine, good, kind and swell – none of which are more imaginative than nice, nor as versatile in meaning.
And there’s your other problem. Nice covers an array of descriptions: pleasant, good, kind, affable, fragrant, tasty, charming, considerate… what other adjective on its own does that? More importantly, it avoids the blight of modern English usage: overstatement. Nice describes something moderately good; not fine, not grand, not marvellous, wonderful or delightful. Life rarely reaches such heights. And even when it does, let’s not forget we’re British and we have a patriotic duty to play things down.
So nice is very much a word for today: a word that describes that big chunk of life that is moderately good, a word that takes minimal time to say, minimal space to write, and when you use it, everyone knows what you mean.
Except Nige, that is.
