"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 16/10/17 (pedant, naughty, nice)

You know, how much I love reading dictionaries. And the reason is that the most of the words in everyday English have been in and sometimes out of circulation for centuries, and if you read something like the Oxford English Dictionary, a historical dictionary, you can see the story of a word right from its birth to its current meaning, and so many of them have been around for centuries. But there have been some very startling twists along the way. So a "pedant", in the 16th century, that was a schoolmaster, simply. But do you remember those ads for cream cake in the '80s, '90s and the slogan was "Naughty but nice"? It was a line that was writing bu Salman Rushdie, who used to be a copywriter. Well, those two words, "noughty" and "nice", have undergone a really long journey. So if you go back to the 14th century, "naughty" had a very, vety different meaning, and it draws on that word "nought". In other words, it was someboby who had nothing, they were paupers, they were just impoverished in every way. And that idea of being a pauper turned to somebody who was morally bad and wicked, in other words, they were poor in virtue. They had no good qualities at all. So you can see that that one's brcome much more diluted over time and now "noughty" 's a lottle bit mischievous, if yuo're describing a child. And "nice" is another really odd one. Goes back to the Latin "nescius", meaning ignorant. And it was "ne-", meaning not, the negative, and "scius" there is linked to science, it was all about knowledge, so it was somebody who had no knowledge. And as a result they were foolish of silly. So a very different maening of "nice" to today. It then encompassed so many different qualities like cowardice or laziness, etc. But eventually, in the Middle Ages, it took on shyness and reserve. That meand somebody who did not neccessarily know a lot - still going back to that root - but were somehow quite shy and reserved with it. And those were seen to be very, very nice qualities - "nice" - and it's how we ended up with "nice" today. Although, it may gone full circle, because if you call someone "nice" of a pair of throusers "nice" those days, it doesn't always meanthat it's particularly gushing compliment. But those are just a few of the examples of thing that have just come such a long way. And who knows, they may still evolve over the next 100 or 200 years.