Other words for "nice" and why I won't ever be convinced we don't need them

Is "nice" even that nice?

A fact about me (I’m not sure if I can call it “fun” or “little-known,” so I’ll just go ahead and call it a fact and let you choose your own adjective): I was in a sorority in college.

While I know that being in Greek life isn’t for everyone and has plenty of drawbacks (or worse), it was largely a positive experience for me. Joining a sorority helped me find my place on a campus where I felt totally out of my element. It led me to friendships that I’m still lucky enough to have to this day. It empowered me to seek out leadership opportunities and to learn more about how I can best manage and work with others. Plus, we had a lot of laughs.

One of the biggest reasons that my sorority experience was a good one: the particular chapter I joined at the particular school where I joined it was pretty closely monitored by our national organization. As a result, there was very little tolerance for the kind of bad behavior that’s so often associated with these kinds of groups. Looking back, there’s really only one thing that I feel icky about—and it’s the recruitment process. Diehard proponents of the sorority system will tell you that many clubs and groups involve some sort of formal selection, or that they require members to check certain boxes or fulfill certain requirements. I see that argument and it’s one I’m not here to address in depth—but no matter how you slice it, it’s hard to know that your input (no matter how thoughtful and well-meaning!) may have played a major role in something like the quality of another person’s college experience.

I am, of course, bound to maintain secrecy (lol) around the specifics of our recruitment and selection process. Broadly speaking, I can tell you that we discussed candidates using an ~official~ conversational format. For what it’s worth, there was a lot of emphasis in these sessions on leading with positive language about each and every potential new member… even if everyone’s interactions with them had been objectively terrible.

This brings me to the subject of today’s post: the word “nice”

In the context of the top-secret discussions I’m only vaguely describing, the word “nice” was invariably the adjective invoked when we could think of nothing more precise to bring to the table. There’s the old adage that says if you don’t have anything nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all… but in the case of sorority recruitment, when you don’t have anything nice to say, you actually just say “nice.”

My friends and I can still make each other laugh so hard that our stomachs hurt when we reflect on these bizarre chapter-wide discussions—but other parts of them have also stuck with me.

For the better part of the last decade, I’ve had a weird relationship with the word “nice.”

I guess you could say that my sorority experience is to blame for this development, but I actually think it’s kind of great that I had the chance to interrogate a word that’s used so often it’s practically a throwaway. I’m a writer and therefore a geek about stuff like this, but seriously—how frequently do we say “nice?” What does it even mean?

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Currently Reading: Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton

Earlier this week, I wrote that I wasn’t loving this one as much as I wanted to be—and that I hoped it would start to resonate with me more as it went on. While I can’t say confidently that it’s resonating more, I am happy to report that I’m finding more to appreciate about the way it’s structured. I love the way Dolly includes lists, recipes, email transcripts, and—my favorite—mini-essays that mark the various phases of her life through streams of consciousness about everything she knew about love at each of those ages. I’m almost feeling inspired to take on that challenge myself! What did I think I knew about love at 18, 20, 25, etc.? Dolly considers this at intervals throughout the memoir and it’s really lovely.

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At some point shortly after I had this realization, I told my mom that I didn’t want to be called “nice” anymore. I offered my whole spiel about how the word feels so un-specific and hollow, and told her my sorority recruitment story. She thought I was being nit-picky, and she was (and still is) probably right.

Obviously, there’s nothing inherently wrong with being described this way, particularly by someone I hardly know or who doesn’t owe me something a little more descriptive. But the world is full of so many words, and if you’re someone who doesn’t fall into one of the two categories I just mentioned, calling me nice is going to bug me.