I'm the middle child in my family. Everyone knows that the middle child is usually the most ignored. I have an older brother who's a genius at writing and a younger sister who's a musical prodigy. I got the art thing going on but that's the quietest one out of the three. For some reason, as artistic as we all are, we're somehow extremely violent.
My sister and I love each other to death. And like all siblings, we want to kill each other to death. Not literally... But sometimes yes. Anyhoo, my dad would sometimes see my sister and I in some kind of a domestic squabble and would imitate his best white suburban mom that tells their kids to "Play nice". So I asked him, "What is this thing, 'nice', mean?". Everyone knows what "nice" is, but you gotta sometimes take a step back and look at the word by itself. He brought out a super old dictionary of his, the one where you can see a tree of all the languages and their roots related within the first page. It's pretty neat, but he decided to look up the definition of "nice". After a few explanations of being polite, he came across the definition that "to be nice" means "to be ignorant" (Read the Middle English reference part).
After he read that, he told us "Okay. Never be nice. Ever. But stop beating the shit out of each other."
I felt like that was much more clear advice than the first sentence.
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