I’m going to start this post with one of my favorite language stories. If I called you a “nice person” you’d feel that was a complement, right?  Ah, but that’s by today’s standard.  For Chaucer to call someone a “nice” person was to say that person was foolish, silly, or ignorant.  Both Chaucer and Shakespeare could also use it to describe someone as “wanton” or “dissolute” (think of the Prodigal Son, here). The resource, par excellence, for exploring the past use of words in English is the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).  Not only does this dictionary give you the...
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