A person (usually a guy) can be put in the friend-zone or be friend-zoned when someone he is interested in dating views him as just a friend. In current usage, it’s not uncommon to see some so-called nice guys throwing around the term friend-zone. This piece helped influence Nice Guy™ and Nice Guy Syndrome, terms for men who think being nice alone entitles them sex. At least that’s in part how the website Heartless Bitches International saw it in their noted 2002 denunciation against the nice guy. In the 2000s on some feminist spaces on the internet, nice guy started to more specifically refer to an insecure man who expects his kindness to be rewarded with sex. You’ve likely heard-or maybe even used-the expression he’s a nice guy, but … People may use this phrase as a polite way to decline a potential male partner, whether because they aren’t interested in him or personally don’t find him attractive in some way. Nice Guy.” A reporter memorably asked it of Richard Nixon about the Vietnam War in 1977. Alice Cooper rocked the saying in his 1973 track “No More Mr. Nice Guy, said when someone is throwing down-and implying nice guys are soft and weak. Nice guy also makes an appearance in no more Mr. The expression nice guys finish last-agreeable people who get overpowered by their more assertive counterparts-is credited to Brooklyn Dodgers manager Leo Durocher in 1946. Predated by nice fellow in the 1800s, the phrase nice guy is found in the written record in the early 1900s. This dating nice guy apparently draws on earlier constructions of nice guy. As found on internet forums as early as the 1980s, romantically unsuccessful men have identified as the nice guy, always losing out to their nemesis: the bad boy. In fact, it seems nice, harkening back to its root, is becoming a not-so-nice word again. Over 200 years later, nice still “does (the job) for everything.” It’s a catch-all word for someone or something “pleasant” or “agreeable.”īut, in the popular dating culture, the nice guy has become anything but. Oh, it is a very nice word, indeed!-it does for everything.” What’s the origin of the phrase nice guy? He jokes: “… and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Jane Austen, for instance, mocked this now-positive term in Northanger Abbey (1817) when Henry Tilney teases the naive Catherine Morland for her overuse of nice. The high value placed on being coy, delicate, and reserved was instrumental in the semantic amelioration of the term nice in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. At this time, nice began to refer to “a person who was finely dressed, someone who was scrupulous, or something that was precise or fussy.”īy the late 1500s, nice was further softening, describing something as “refined, culture,” especially used of polite society. Starting in the late 1300s, nice began to refer to “conduct, a person, or clothing that was considered excessively luxurious or lascivious.” However, by the 1400s a new, more neutral sense of nice was emerging. And for almost a century, nice was used to characterize a “stupid, ignorant, or foolish” person. Nice, it turns out, began as a negative term derived from the Latin nescius, meaning “unaware, ignorant.” This sense of “ignorant” was carried over into English when the word was first borrowed (via French) in the early 1300s.
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