A Short History of Niceness

I don’t think it is an overstatement to say that niceness has a hold on us, but in order to understand why that is, it helps to understand how it came to be. Like many words, nice has meant different things at different times. Its meaning has evolved throughout the centuries, dating as far back as 1604 when the word nice was featured in the first dictionary of the English language, Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall. There it is defined as “‘slow and laysie,’ and its origins are deemed unequivocally French.”

In her book American Niceness, author Carrie Tirado Bramen…