When I was hired to write this column in 2004, the editor who chose me for the job said: “I want readers to like you.”
She wanted me to be nice.
For obvious reasons, that’s not something editors tell most columnists. You want your columnists free to tick off readers. You want your columnists free to be disliked. You don’t want them hobbled by the shackles of nice.
But this isn’t like most columns. It’s a little island of likability in an often despair-filled ocean of news. It’s nice.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that four-letter word lately. I think we’d all agree that 2020 has not been nice. It has been the opposite of nice.
I’m not sure there’s a precise antonym for “nice.” That’s because “nice” is a fairly expansive word, suitable for all sorts of situations. It’s so flexible that it’s prone to overuse. In Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey,” an exasperated character says of it: “Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! It does for everything.”
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Among the antonyms for “nice” in Roget’s Thesaurus are “ugly,” “horrible,” “nasty” and “repulsive.” Those words all seem charged with more dark energy than the bland energy that animates “nice.” Still, there’s no denying they all apply to 2020.
Folks, it hasn’t been nice.
Apparently, “nice” comes to us from Latin, through Old French, into Middle English, then into the English we speak today.
It was a weird journey. Its Latin root is “nescius,” which means “ignorant, stupid.” The Online Etymology Dictionary traces the evolution of “nice,” from “ignorant” to “foolish” through “timid,” then to “fussy,” then to “precise.” It isn’t until the middle of the 18th century that “nice” starts to resemble what we think when we hear it now: “agreeable.”
“Nice” still carries a whiff of its unloved birth. It may not mean “foolish” anymore, but no one really wants to be described as “nice.” “She’s a nice girl” isn’t exactly high praise. As for “nice guys,” you know where they finish.
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I’m guessing that particular bromide — “Nice guys finish last” — is drilled into a lot of peoples’ heads when they’re growing up. Its message: It’s okay to be horrible, nasty and repulsive if that helps you wind up rich and famous. You don’t want to risk ending up poor and nice.
Or nice and poor. It’s funny how putting “nice” first intensifies the poverty.
In 2015, The Washington Post’s Steven Ginsberg interviewed then-candidate Donald Trump. For his last question, Ginsberg posed something that had been suggested by his 8-year-old son, Sam. It was a simple question: “Are you a nice guy?”
Trump gives an interesting response. As is typical, at first he doesn’t really address the actual question. Trump says that the question he’s asked most often is what’s the deal with his hair. Then he segues to a mention of a show that the History Channel has just done about him. (A “nice story,” is how Trump describes it. “Nice piece,” echoes his then-campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski.)
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Finally, Trump answers: “Tell your son I think I’m a very nice person who gets along very well with people. I’m very loyal, to a fault. My wife said, ‘You’re too nice too long and then when you go bad, then you’re too bad.’ Then she said, ‘You get too vicious and you never forgive. You put up with too much too long. You get screwed by somebody. You’re too nice, and then you flip, it’s too long, too nasty, too horrible.’”
I will leave it to historians to unpack that paragraph — to ponder what it means to be “too nice too long” and whether it applies to the outgoing president — but I will say that it’s time to reclaim the word “nice.” It’s a nice word, and there’s nothing wrong with it.
As the protagonist in Kingsley Amis’s “Lucky Jim” puts it: “Nice things are nicer than nasty ones.”
Of course, simply using the word “nice” more often in 2021 won’t be enough. We have to be nice. When we say “Have a nice day,” we have to mean it — and we have to do our part to make it so.
Twitter: @johnkelly
For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly.
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