Friday, April 27, 2018

Nice

Creative writing instructors, entertainment critics, and your 7th grade English teacher, Miss Collins, justifiably excoriate the word “nice” as being bland, non-specific, and, in general, just an insufferably weak-titted term of approbation.

To label something “nice” is to paint it with a broad, flaccid brush—in beige—and sound like a combination of the Church Lady and your grandmother as she reviews the selection of Hallmark greeting cards at the local five and dime.

That said, there’s something nice about the term “nice” which is particularly apt in relation to a Thursday night bike ride with three dozen or so fellow cyclists on a lovely, cloudless evening in spring whose record warm temperatures really bring folks out—many of whom, apparently, have been hiding under rocks or being otherwise engaged during our recent months of drizzle and gloom.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “nice” originally comes from the Latin “nescius” which refers to foolish and silly; the semantic development of how it has come to take on its current meaning as pleasing or pleasant is, according to the OED, so mysterious as to be “unparalleled in Latin or in the Romance languages.”

But it’s surely no mystery how the foolish and silly become so nice when you’re out on two wheels.  All it takes is the foolish silliness of multiple routes to the same familiar provisioning stop and then the silly foolishness of riding east across the water to quaff quaffables in a public park a mere billy-club’s throw away from the city hall and police station of our region’s wealthiest municipality.

Additionally, the OED defines “nice” as well-executed; commendably performed or accomplished, as in “nice going,” “nice try,” or “nice work,” all of which were also on display: it was nice going across the lake twice on two difference bridges; nice try for half the group missing swamp trail riding, and to get all this and still be home by midnight--Nice work!

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