Nice: Isy Suttie on a word she’s used “too many times”

I’ve recently decided to try to obliterate a few words from my already sparse vocabulary. Those words include lovely and nice.“Why would you banish the word nice?” you ask. “It’s perfectly fine – it does the job.” Sure it does, but it’s much too easy.

There are certain words which float readily into our consciousness when we can’t be arsed to delve deeper. They include, nice, lovely, bad, shit and cool. They’re like choosing the medium sauce at Nando’s, or drinking Stella in Bruges, where you could drown yourself in amazing lagers – although it does somehow taste nicer in Bruges (I’ve done it again). Be more adventurous and choose the hottest sauce! What’s the worst that can happen? You shit yourself at the table? So what? This is living, buddy!

I’ve used the word nice too many times. It’s lost any meaning it initially had. If only I hadn’t described Becky Newton’s ballet shoes as nice back in 1986 (they were amazing), or giggled, “No, it was nice!” about my first kiss, when our braces got stuck together on the fairground waltzer, violently jiggling us as we closed our eyes, tried to breathe through our noses and prayed for it to end.

These days I often describe audiences in gigs as “nice” when I should be more specific. An audience is rarely just nice. It’s often fractious, unpredictable, moved at bits you didn’t think it would be, bored in the bits you thought it might be interested. An audience is like a sulky teenager who surprisingly, on a whim, spends all their pocket money on a round of sambucas to cheer everyone up at a funeral; it can’t be tamed. And if a boozy teenager is nice then something’s gone wrong.

There are a few occasions when nice is the perfect word to use. Of course you have to use it about someone’s shit-boring relative; of course you have to say it about a crap Christmas present (the dancing flower from the 1980s again? Cheers Auntie Martha!) or a rubbish meal (the spaghetti hoops in a volcano of Smash again? Cheers self!) In fact the more I think about it, nice is a word which is often used in place of its opposite; as modern slang like sick, which actually means “cool”, or bare, which actually means “lots of’. In which case we should all use it more. Unlike lovely, which to me, is like quirky and kooky, and should be banished to purgatory along with the dancing flowers, Smash, and spaghetti hoops.