Nice Guy Explained

[Nilsa Housman]

Onelengthy email came from Roger McKnight, a retired professor from Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter. McKnight, who taught Scandinavian studies, was disappointed we did not explain the roots of our state's perceived standoffishness.

"The traditional culture of Norway/Sweden was for centuries based on the concept of One People, One Language, One Religion," McKnight writes. "Swedes' lifelong friends were chosen from among people they went to school with and their kinship group. An individual made friends slowly, but they were friends for life --- in the true sense of the term 'for life.'"

Anyone who has lived in Scandinavia, as McKnight did for years, knows that "it's somewhat hard to get an 'in' there," he said. But once the friendship is established, "all barriers to communication break down and there results a torrent of friendship, expressions of sincerity, and even personal confidences."

The lovely young Swedish couple I met in the second part of my series, Ylwa Eklund Falk and Fredrik Eklund, also pointed out this cultural nuance. Falk once heard one of her countrymen compare Swedish stoicism to American friendliness with a clever fruit analogy.

"Americans are like peaches. They have this nice, soft outer shell that's easy to penetrate. And there's a tight, hard core that's hard to get underneath," she told me. "Swedes are kind of like oranges. It's a thick, hard peel at first, but there's a big soft mushy inside."

This interesting mix of fierce loyalty and initial aloofness apparently applies to Germans, too. That's according to my colleague Alex Friedrich, son of a German immigrant. Alex lived in his father's home country for five years, and says the people there tend to be more reserved.

"No one moved. Everyone already had their friends already," he said. "They see friendship as a sort of investment, and they consider Americans shallow people who say 'LOVE YOU!' and then flake out when you need them. No need to bother with us unless we prove our worth."

Moreover, Professor McKnight explains, there's something in Scandinavian culture called the Law of Jante, a proverbial concept that values understatedness over backslapping. Tell me if his description sounds familiar:

"Not making a fuss of oneself, not boasting in public, not thinking a person is better than anyone else," he says. "It says in the ten commandments: Don't think you are better than us; don't think you can stand out from us. In short, conform and don't make a commotion of yourself."

But judging from the barrage of responses and social-media chatter our series generated, a lot of transplants to the state are having trouble moving their relationships from "acquaintance" to "friend for life." Some have even emailed us asking for advice on where to meet people.

I know the difference between user time and sys time. However, I'm not quite sure about the nice time. I used to know that nice time is the time used in nice pr, but when I did an experiment, I found that the nice time didn't grow up after I reniced a 100%-CPU-using program(infinite loop doing add in Java) to 19. So, I'm confused...

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Just like ravi de faire votre connaissance, this is one of the most formal ways you can say nice to meet you in French. Save it for those situations that really call for it, like meeting dignitaries or other people in positions that command respect.

In this article, we will define nice and kind, explain how they are used differently, and provide examples of what we typically mean when we say that someone is being nice or being kind.

The word nice typically means a person is pleasant to be around and has good manners. A nice person is cheerful and well-mannered and says friendly things to others. Sometimes, the word nice is also used more generally to say that someone is harmless or average.

Niceness, then, is often expressed through words or gestures, while kindness is often expressed through acts. Thinking about it this way, you can see that it is possible to be nice without being kind or to be kind without being nice.

This is where similes come into play, like small gems that coruscate in our language as well as enriching our descriptions and painting vivid portraits with words. In this article, we explored an apprised trove of similes for nice that go beyond the commonplace, offering vivacious alternatives to express the beauty of niceness.

5) DD: You're black and white. I like that. Money aside, why did you choose to sign with the Texans?

DS: I think it's easy to get excited about a young team. It was a roster that didn't have a very good record last year. But the roster is solid. Having played against them last year, I just had a lot of respect for what they were able to accomplish. You bring in a good coaching staff and then I come in and I meet a great nutrition staff, and a great strength staff and a great front office. All the things are lined up. I'm like "Dude, how is this not a winning organization? I think all the pieces have been in place. Bringing in that SF scheme and that SF defense, I'm biased because like they kicked me out of the playoffs the last two years. It's a solid, solid scheme. I'm already bought into that aspect of it. Then you come here and you meet all the guys and you're around the locker room and you see the young leadership, the old leadership. It's just a recipe for success. So to me, it was kind of an easy decision.

6) DD: When you actually got the playbook and looked at it, how eye-opening was that for you?

DS: It's nice because they make a lot of stuff look exactly the same. That's a classic Shanahan offense. But just to see it in action, like on paper, it's like, oh my God, I can do so much with this. The second thing is, it's a lot. I was a little bit more of a West Coast offense guy in college. So I'm used to kind of a little bit of verbiage. But the amount of different formations and the amount of routes and the route tree, it's just it's a lot of volume. So I get why guys could maybe struggle early with learning a system like this. It's a lot of stuff. That is definitely a challenge and a challenge that as a young team, I think we look forward to. Because we got a lot of guys that haven't been in a ton of offenses. This is their first one that they can maybe really sink their teeth into. I think it's good, man. It allows you to really dial in on a week-to-week basis. You can always pull something out of the woodworks. I'm excited. I think 'Slow (Texans Offensive Coordinator Bobby Slowik) is doing a great job with installing and making things easier on us. Really categorizing things and putting things in specific buckets to make it easier to remember certain concepts and whatnot. I think the coaching staff, as a whole, has done a really good job with the transition from free agency to the draft to now where we can start putting these things in place at OTAs and I think it's really been smooth.

7) DD: It's cool to hear you say that, because last week when Slowik was meeting with the media, he talked about how at a very base level, they broke things down. How important is that as a player, seeing that and knowing how complex that playbook is?

DS: That's great. To be quite frank, the first few weeks we were all like, 'Gosh, are we doing enough?' They broke things down exactly. Like, "Okay, this is going to be this route, at this depth, at this many steps and we're going to do it exactly like this. It's just a lot of literally breaking down a route into a 5-minute presentation out there on the field. We'd get two or three of those, and that was our day. As a player, you're like, "Okay, can we put it all in? Can we go a little bit?" But having a staff that's willing to sit down and really go into the details and depths from the get-go, it shows, maybe for the young guys that haven't been in a bunch of offenses in the NFL and don't understand what the detail it takes to succeed as an offense on this level, it gives them a really good platform to kind of build their understanding of, "Okay, I have this route, why do I have this route? What do we want to throw this route for? What coverage is this route for? What release am I going to take on this route and why am I going to take this release again?" It's a lot when you're telling a guy for the first time "This is why we do it." The reasoning behind it is really nice and good and successful in my opinion. Starting from the ground up like that because it's easy to kind of just say, "Hey, just do this and then go back and figure out why I am doing this later? But if you start from that, I think it gives you a little broader understanding of the overall concept and opens up a path to kind of understand the offense at a deeper level from the get-go.

8) DD: So you just brought up all the stuff about running routes, catching passes and so on and so forth, but you're a tight end, so you're also an offensive lineman too.

DS: I need to touch on that because, arguably, that's the part of the offense that I'm most excited for.

9) DD: How come?

DS: Because to my core, I'm an offensive lineman. I grew up an offensive lineman. I played center forever. I dropped weight right before high school, played tight end my last year of Little League and then kind of went into my career as a tight end from there. But I love blocking people. It's fun. Especially when you're in an offense where everything is so finely defined. "Hey, this is where this ball is going. This is exactly how we're blocking. This is where the point's going to go. Hey, we're running this play. Here's exactly the track. Here's how these combos and double teams are going to work." It's black and white. Going back to our original conversation, there's no gray area for how things should be. For me in the run game, it's so easy to just tee off and just go. Whereas, in some other schemes that I've been in going even back to college, it's like "Well if they do this then, maybe we do this." No, it's, it's easy. It's this or this.

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