Investigating the Naughty and Nice Lists
Hello,
It’s the second last day of November and I’ve decided I’m on the Nice List. I’ve spent the last 29 days drafting most of a book about Christmas words and I’m sure Santa would approve. I passed the 50,000 words finish line in NaNoWriMo 2021 today (50,152 to be precise) and after a very busy writing, NaNoWriMo regional mentoring, and book promotion month (I had a ball at the #HistoryWritersDay online book fair on Twitter last weekend) I’ll be putting up my feet somewhat until the New Year. Never fear, I’ll still be posting here though, Wordfoolery is fun, not work.
My 15th winNaturally the new book has an entire chapter dedicated to Santa Claus and associated words like Rudolph, North Pole, Krampus, and more. While writing it, I investigated the naughty and nice lists and thought I’d share it today. Enjoy!
Extract from “Words Christmas Gave Us” by Grace Tierney, copyright 2021
Santa always has a strong interest in whether a child was naughty or nice and letters to Santa give children a chance to plead their case. Santa will always give them a second chance to avoid the dreaded Naughty List.
Naughtiness isn’t much more than mischief in most youthful offenders, but that hasn’t always been so, as demonstrated by the history of the word. When naughty joined English, spelled as nowghty or noughti (you just have to love early English spelling, don’t you?) in the late 1300s it had two meanings.
The first was to be needy, to have nothing. It was a way to describe somebody caught in poverty. The second was more judgemental, it described somebody as evil, immoral, unclean, and corrupt. That’s a pretty bad score sheet and it isn’t surprising that it would result in a zero presents result.
It acquired those meanings from the word nought or naught which was defined as nothingness, a trifle or insignificant person, the number zero but also as evil or an evil act. Somehow the number zero was equal to evil. This may explain some children’s aversion to studying the noble science of mathematics.
Over time the whole naughty is evil thing eased, thank goodness. By the 1600s somebody who was mischievous, disobedient, or improper would be called naughty, especially if that person was a child.
By the 1800s this also applied to an adult who might be promiscuous, but of course that’s not what Santa’s naughty list is about because he only brings gifts to the children of the world.
Like naughty, nice has changed meaning several times during its lifetime. It began in English in the late 1200s as an adjective for somebody who is foolish, ignorant, and frivolous. It had arrived directly from Old French from the Latin word nescius (ignorant or unaware) which translates directly from ne (not) and scire (to know). Scire is the same verb that gives us science.
By the early 1300s, nice meant timid or faint-hearted, by the late 1300s it was dainty or delicate, and by the 1500s it was precise or careful. That discovery made me laugh aloud as my English teacher in school insisted we never use nice in the modern meaning in our work, but only to indicate careful precision. She was only four centuries too late on that one. The precision meaning is retained in the phrase nice distinction.
By the 1700s, somebody nice was agreeable or delightful and in the 1800s we had added kind and thoughtful to that description. By the early 1900s it was declared to be a great favourite with the ladies “who have charmed out of it all its individuality and converted it into a mere diffuser of vague and mild agreeableness”. This was probably what my teacher detested. Certainly Jane Austen wasn’t a fan as she dedicates an entire scene in “Northanger Abbey” (1803) between Henry and Catherine to complaining about how the word nice had become a mild, and ultimately weak, adjective to describe anything from books to weather, walks, and people.
What about the infamous Naughty List and its more pleasant sibling, the Nice List? Neither appear in the stories about Santa until the song “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” was released in 1934 and became an immediate Christmas classic. In fact the song only mentions one list, although he does check it twice so it’s possible that Santa merely keeps a census of all the children in the world and marks either a tick or a cross to indicate whether their gifts should be loaded onto the sleigh on Christmas Eve. Either way, try to be good. We all want to be on the Nice List, right?
end of extract
Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,
Grace (@Wordfoolery)
