One of my favourite words is nice.
That’s not a description, I mean the actual word, nice.
Not because of what it means, but because of what it has meant.
You see, the word—which these days typically means pleasant or agreeable (it’s a nice day, she’s a nice person) originally started out meaning stupid.
The word comes to us by way of Latin (and before you say, of course it does, English is actually a Germanic language, though more than half of the words in the English language find their roots in Latin), from the word nescius, meaning “ignorant, unaware” (ne (not) + scire (know)). “No sense,” is what I usually say, though that is not actually true, as the word sense doesn’t come from the same root…you know what? You don’t care.
But how do you get from ignorant to pleasant? By making a lot of stops along the way.
Nice started off as a French word in the 1100s, and made the leap to English by the end of the 1200s—not surprising, since the Normans (read: French) invaded England in 1066, and basically became the bosses of the place. While the common folk kept speaking English, the ruling class was basically French and saw no need to learn English, so the serving class learned the language of the conquerors instead, and nice, began to be used by the commoners.
Rather quickly, the word began to mean “timid” or “faint-hearted.” Which is a short step from the original “ignorant.”
100 years after that, it became “fussy” or “fastidious”. In another 100 years, it mostly meant “dainty” or “delicate”.
By the 1500s, it had become “precise,” “careful”. In 1769, the word was used to mean “agreeable,” and “delightful” (1769), and by 1830, it took on the meaning of “kind,” or “thoughtful”.
Indeed, there are places in that transition when someone might call you nice, and you wouldn’t know if it was an insult or a compliment.
It was only 100 years ago in 1926 that H.W. Fowler wrote: that the word was “too great a favorite with the ladies, who have charmed out of it all its individuality and converted it into a mere diffuser of vague and mild agreeableness.”
Whew. What a journey that one word has taken.
I’ve been thinking about words since my last issue, when I declared that I wasn’t going to use the name of the February 10 perpetrator.
And I suggested that I might use the phrase “the shooter” instead.
But I know a lot of people who like their second amendment freedoms—which is not a Canadian thing. (Also, it didn’t give people the right to defend themselves. It was legitimizing slave owners ability to gather together in groups (militia) and arm themselves so they could go and track down (and if necessary, shoot) escaped slaves.)
But even though we don’t have a second amendment rights, Canadians do have the “regulated privilege” to own guns. And a lot of gun owners feel like their privileges are being slowly revoked with legislation such as the long gun registration.
And I know that some of these people will feel like the phrase “the shooter” is too politicized. It associates the motives with the methods.
Some have rightfully pointed out that other terrorist attacks have been perpetrated by people not wielding guns. Bombs have been used, as have cars. And in one of the most horrific and deadly terrorist attacks in history, planes were used.
Of course, they are typically making the point that people who kill people, and leave the guns out of it, but that doesn’t really address why we equip our military with guns and not, you know, pointy sticks. Fully automatic firearms have a capacity to kill and incapacitate people far greater than, say, stiletto heals. (A Texas woman killed her boyfriend that way.)
Which raises the question: is “shooter” too … politically charged a word?
In the Court documents filed by the FBI, they referred to the perpetrator by the person’s initials, but that seems… a little close to the mark.
Perpetrator is a possibility, but I’d have to learn how spell it (spell check is a wonderful thing, even for word nerds such as I). But it feels maybe a bit too clinical. Too distant.
There are more violent words. Murderer. Slayer.
And there are less violent words. Culprit. Offender.
The one that I’m eyeing up is “attacker.” It captures that this was a horrific act, but without naming the person or attaching what they did to their specific action.
But I’m open to suggestions. In fact, I encourage them. I reserve the right to ignore suggestions—especially the ones that fall into the Boaty McBoatface style of nomenclature suggestions—but this is a serious question for the community.
Because despite the fact that I wind up writing 90 percent of the content in here, it’s not supposed to be my own personal newsletter, offering my own opinions on matters. It is a community newspaper, trying to capture what is happening in town.
It’s not without its biases, but hopefully those biases run towards caring about the people who live here, even those of you who mock me for caring for people.
Indeed, I can already hear people calling this whole discussion stupid. But the fact is, words have power. Not to create reality, but to bend our perception of it. When I was 13, four words destroyed my self-image and nearly destroyed me. I still struggle with the fallout of that, more than 40 years later.
A single word can foment a revolution. They can shape how we act, how we look at people. Words can divide and can draw us together. And I hope what I do here at the paper is use words to draw us together. Words that reflect the diversity here in town and the complexity of trying to capture all that diversity in a single page.
I still get asked by other media “how are people in town doing”, when talking about what happened, and I still say that I do not presume to speak for the town. Some are doing great, some not so much. Some are still shattered, some have moved on.
Eight pages every two weeks is far too short a space to capture Tumbler Ridge in all it’s glory, but I hope that it acts as a snapshot, as a shorthand, as a lens through which to view the community.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
