Lore Lucid Lexicon nice
late 13th century, "foolish, ignorant, frivolous, senseless"
from Old French nice (12thc.) "careless, clumsy; weak; poor, needy; simple, stupid, silly, foolish,"
from Latin nescius "ignorant, unaware," literally "not-knowing"
The German translation for the contemporary nice is "nett" which stems from Latin nitidus, making it equivalent to the English neat.
In contemporary usage, nice is a synonym for many virtues and positive attributes! A complete ☣ distortion of the original sense and meaning ("foolish, ignorant, frivolous, senseless").
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in many examples from the 16th and 17th centuries it is difficult to say in what particular sense the writer intended it to be taken.
For two centuries readers couldn't be sure whether something is described as foolish and frivolous or polite and virtuous!
Tremendous ☣ distortions of context and understanding are possible in such times. For anyone who holds power over others ― as is common in the artificium, with its royalty, governments, and institutions ― such chaos is an efficient method of diluting and, consequently, utterly dissolving sense, thereupon allowing for arbitrary, hand-picked parameters to replace the original meaning.
Naturally, this method can only work if it is accepted by the people. However, in the artificium, humans are taught to be compliant. Compliance and submissiveness are treated as polite and virtuous, much like in this example of the transformation of the word nice.
| ~☉~ | lucid definition; added layer of lucidity, or aethereal context |
| ⚜ | classic definition |
| ☣ | artificium definition; usually words which have undergone a warped evolution, or a complete perversion of the original sense |