Yesterday I talked about using the word “aught” to mean “zero.” I probably should have also mentioned that although most people that I knew used the word aught, some said the word “naught.” The dictionary says that naught means “nothing,” so I can see why some people used it when referring to zero. But if you dig a little further, some dictionaries say that its use is archaic or restricted to literary uses. It’s most often used in sentences or phrases like “His studying was for naught, since he flunked.”
So I guess if you’re into these old words, the rule of thumb is “aught” is preferred when dealing with numbers and “naught” is preferred outside of math.
Now that that’s our of the way, you might be interested to learn that the word “naughty” is derived from “naught” — like, someone might have naught morals or manners. But the original meaning of naughty was “poor.”
And I suppose we should give “nice” equal time with “naughty” — after all, they seem to kind of go together. Nice is from the Latin nescius, that means not-knowing. So nice originally meant foolish or ignorant. It didn’t used to be nice to be nice. But over time, the word’s meaning took on a number of meanings. Today, someone is considered nice if they’re polite and kind.
I usually think of naughty and nice mostly around Christmas time — we always told our kids and grandkids that Santa Clause kept a naughty and nice list. The fact that Santa kept these lists didn’t become apparent until the song “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” became popular (in 1934, according to my extensive research.) I guess it’s good that the song wasn’t written earlier because naughty and nice meant something very different than what they do today.
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