Wishing you a Nifty New Year

Hello and Happy New Year,

I’m starting my fifteenth year of writing about unusual English words and their histories today. I haven’t run out of words yet and I’m accumulating dictionaries and reference books, as well as slowly filling a shelf with my own books. Thanks for joining me on the Wordfoolery journey.

This week’s word is nifty, because I like how it sounds. It is defined as good, skillful, effective, attractive, and stylish so I hereby wish you a nifty new year.

Happy New Year from Wordfoolery!

Somewhere last year I stumbled upon the delightful fact that nifty is short for magnificent (sadly I didn’t jot down the source) and it charmed me. Magnificent seems so formal and impressive whereas nifty has a chirpy upbeat casual vibe. They are unlikely cousins. However I’m not a carbon copy of all my cousins, we just share familial roots, like nifty and magnificent.

Nifty entered English in the late 1800s to describe something or somebody as being stylish or attractive. Some believe it may have come from theatrical slang, but an early use of it was in a poem by Bret Harte (1836-1902, American poet and short fiction writer) who claimed it was a short form of magnificat.

The magnificat is a hymn or speech by the Virgin Mary in the Christian gospels. The word joined English around 1200 from Latin magnus (great) and facere (to make or do). The word is borrowed from the opening of the Mary’s speech in Latin. It is hard to see how nifty is a shortening of this solemn religious word, although both relate to things or people being great.

An almost parallel word to magnificat is magnificent. You may describe a stylish person as nifty or magnificent but it’s hard to see you saying somebody is magnificat. Some guess that nifty is simply formed from other similar words like natty (stylish) or spiffy (excellent).

Magnificent has very similar roots to magnifcat, in fact. It entered English in the mid 1400s from Old French to describe somebody as being glorious, great in deeds. The French word again comes from Latin magnus (great) and facere (to make or do). By the 1500s magnificent was being used to describe a splendid life in grandeur and by the 1700s it was an exclamation expressing admiration or enthusiasm. The hop from there to nifty isn’t too hard to make.

Without a time machine and the ability to check with Bret Harte whether he said magnificat when he meant magnificent we may never know the true origin of nifty but in the meantime we can enjoy it and use it.

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,
Grace (@Wordfoolery)