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The sad demise of the word “nice”.
Lev David is
a writer and media consultant with a startlingly fresh approach to
communicating your message. The words and ideas are lean, precise &
simply unstoppable. Smacking the mainstream
media’s arse since he was 15, good enough is never good enough for Lev. Screw
ordinary. The world is
a mess of messages. Cut through. |
Perhaps you
were told. Perhaps you overheard it. But somehow, somewhere it happened to
you too. For me, it
was a high school English teacher forbidding our class to use it in our
writing. She called it a “style no-no”, which was odd, given that her
relationship with style seemed generally strained, both in her words and her
wardrobe. The word nice, we were told, was insipid. Weak.
Whenever and wherever the anti-nice-propaganda
started, the sentiment spread virulently. And we became the good people who
stood by and did nothing as the genocide of those four, innocent little
letters began. Calling
something or someone “nice” was thought of as a veiled admission of
disinterest, or worse that it/him/her wasn’t significant enough to bother
forming proper opinion on at all. But that was only the start of it. Nice, shooed by an embarrassed world into the back
alleys of the vocabulary like some shivering street child, fell victim to
that perverse, sweaty villain of language, Sarcasm. “That’s
nice,” came to mean: “Actually, that’s rubbish. I’m just too smarmy to come
out and say it.” More than ever, nice
was a four-letter-word. Gurus of
style, wearing their full-length leather jackets and sunglasses indoors,
waved their arms about, flashing wild heroin eyes, hunting the nices out of
the pages in which they once gently grazed. Those they missed were caught in nice-traps. No nice was safe. Nor was an alright
or okay. We were
encouraged, nay, implored, nay, ordered to be certain. To give our sentences
balls. Things couldn’t be just nice!
Why not great? Grand! Amazing!
Incredible! Strong words! Definite words, prickling with invisible
exclamation marks! Bold words for bold times. Sentences,
running wild along neon lines, were pinned to pages with rivet guns and
throwing knives. There was no doubt about what anybody was thinking. They
just said it. This was
more than an attack on a word, though. This was an attack on a state of mind
and just a small part of the tyrannical land grab for the ungentle world of
extremes-- Hard
heroes, fast women and fast food. 3 hour season finales, 2-minute noodles and
1-touch microwaves. No more Mr. Nice Guy. Nice guys finish last. Have a nice
day? I don’t think so. Now, we’re
hooked on unambiguous things--pop-up presidents battling paper villains.
Number one songs and Best Picture Oscars. Nice
isn’t of this world. It shifts in its seat uncomfortably, looking
distractedly around the room. But I like it for that. I can’t
defend nice against everything. It has
a definite indefiniteness about it, but is that so bad? There’s a sweet
honesty in middleness, and so many things are nice
in the nicest possible way. Ever had a
random Tuesday that feels, from the morning, like the lazy end of a Friday?
You might not get much work done, but that’s okay. And nice. Mint tea is
nice. Having a cat curled at your feet as you work at your desk is nice. The
way babies’ hands close around your giant fingers is nice. And amazing. But
nice, especially. Having
somebody cover you with a blanket when you fall asleep in front of the TV is
nice. Particularly when you both know that you’re not really asleep, but
neither says so. Semi-colons are nice; like the word nice, in fact, they’re a sort of compromise between two
too-definite things. Austen is
nice. (I’m talking about Jane, the writer, though. Not Stone Cold Steve, the
professional wrestler. He’s not nice. He’s great!) And, yes,
the word is sometimes a thing to hide one’s true feelings behind. But does
everything need to be so damn courageous? “You’re
nice,” says she to he, using the word as a Spanish fan behind which to hide
her giveaway smile. The way I
see it, there aren’t so many words in the world that we can afford to lose
one, let alone systematically exterminate it. In uncertain
days, we need words for uncertain things. Words which don’t give too much
away. And if they lie a little, that’s both alright and okay. * * * [The
print rights for this article are available.] © 2005 Lev
David |
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