A post on another forum intoned: "'Drivel' is right, 'dribble' is wrong". This led me to the OED and the discovery that "drivel" in the sense of worthless speech actually started off as "dribble". So the use of "dribble" for "drivel" is just a case of going back to the future, as it were. That then got me thinking about "nice". I would love a T-shirt that says: "Shift happens - only nice people say otherwise". That got me wondering about the evolution of nice from pejorative to compliment, and on to today, when it is increasingly used as a pejorative term once more. That's the elliptical evolution of the thread title. Not circular, since the pejorative usage of "nice" is not the same as its earlier pejorative sense, but still similar in spirit anyway.

Evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, there is something akin to a point to this rambling. Are there other examples of similar evolutions, in which a word's meaning has shifted through spectrums and come back to a point not far from its origin? And would anyone like to design that T-shirt for me, preferably with the firs two words in AS, or even better, PIE?

noho ora mai
http://maxqnzs.com/References.html