Blogs: Pandammonia
The world that revolves around Caity Ross
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A message to my reader:
Thank you for your lovely email - it’s nice to know that someone out there reads and appreciates my twitterings. What you said about your friends and my blog was lovely, and I’m pleased my blog makes you feel that way. As for how do I find the time? I don’t - I just put it off 
As you can see, I also use the word nice when not referring to food. Ignore your teacher - that’s a crazy thing to say. I can’t decide whether it’s better or worse than telling you never to use the word!
You might be interested to learn that nice originally came from *ne Indo-European ‘not’ and *skei Indo-European ‘cut’, which entered Latin in the form scire ‘to know’, so the resulting Latin word is nescire ‘to be ignorant of’. An adjective was formed from this, nescius ‘ignorant’, which, as Latin evolved into Old French as nice ’silly’. It entered English as a loan word from the French with the meaning ‘foolish, shy’, which eventually changed to ‘modest’. Since then, it has had all sorts of different meanings: ‘delicate’, ‘considerate’, ‘pleasant’, ‘agreeable’ (Bauer and Trudgill, 1998).
I see nothing that should apply specifically to food in its etymology, unless it’s for meat that is too tough to cut, which probably means that the meat isn’t very nice anyway.
Bauer, Laurie and Peter Trudgill (eds) (1998) Language myths
This entry was posted on Tuesday 5th December, 2006 ~ 12.14pm GMT and is filed under English and is tagged with blogging, prescriptionism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
