"If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time." -G.K. Chesterton
Friday, June 11, 2010
Latin Strikes Again
Well, I never! I've always thought "nice" was a rather inane adjective for use in describing a person, but based on a definition I ran across on the radio yesterday, it might have once been classed as an out and out insult. "Nice" is from the Latin nescius, "ignorant." Webster's has a disparate collection of meanings for the word, most of them rarely used, but only two of them marked as obsolete: dissolute (obs.), reticent, fastidious, punctillious, precise, trivial (obs.), agreeable, virtuous, and polite. Nice, eh?
To quote the incomparable Peregrin Took, "Well, *that's* nice!" (I couldn't help myself.)
ReplyDeleteOoh, did I set mysel' up for *that* one!
ReplyDelete