Nice! (Photo credit: Sam Howzit)
Seyi sandra in her November 17th post asked: “How would you…want to be remembered? Let’s say in the next five hundred years, what would people say or write about you?”
My off the cuff response was:
I would want to be remembered as kind, not nice; intelligent, not smart; loving, not dependent; hopeful not negative; encouraging not critical.
She wrote back and said that if you are kind, does that not mean you are nice? And I so agree with her–except nice gets such a bad rap. Seems like a warmed up word that you use on people who are somewhat nondescript.
As I so often do, (I am sure you are getting weary of it) I went to my thesaurus and it provides these synonyms for nice: enjoyable, agreeable, pleasant, good, fine, lovely, amusing, wonderful, kind and polite. Alrighty then, (said in a Jim Carry voice) I change my mind—you don’t have to beat me over the head–I want to be known as nice too. Just to take this a step further, and get on your nerves just a little more, some more synonyms for nice are respectable, genteel, seemly, and refined. I like those too, especially genteel.
It seems that nice is a nice thing to be.
So here is my revised answer to Seyi Sandra’s question:
I would want to be remembered as nice and kind, not harsh; intelligent not smart (this is a work in progress); loving not dependent; and encouraging, not critical.
Do you have a negative connotation of nice, or are you more evolved than I and realize that it is a good way to be described?
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