Pylimitics

English has loads and loads of pretentious, stuffy, and even bureaucratic words. But it also has some nifty ones. Like “nifty.” “Nifty” is a casual word for casual use, and it tends to be used in close connection with other casual words. According to the corpus of contemporary American English, the words most often found in close proximity to “nifty” include “little,” “trick” (there’s a nifty little trick right there!), “gadgets,” and “stuff.” 

Most of the synonyms for “nifty” are casual too: “crackerjack,” “groovy,” “keen,” “neat,” “swell,” and even “boffo.” It’s not that an official regulatory agency’s explanation of Rule 361 subparagraph D can’t be nifty, I suppose…but in the unlikely event that an official document approaches niftiness at all, it’s more likely to be described as “supernal” (which is also a nifty synonym for nifty). 

It makes a kind of sense for such an informal word that nobody really knows where “nifty” came from. It was first published in 1865, and the speculation back then was that it came from the Latin word “magnificat.” Nobody thinks that’s very likely. But there’s a loosely defined group of similarly casual words that might very well have come into use simply because of the way they sound. “Nifty,” “spiffy,” “natty”…words like those are just sort of satisfying to say in certain contexts. They’re the same sort of contexts where you’d be likely to find little tricks, stuff, and gadgets. 

Nowadays “nifty” mostly means clever or ingenious, but originally it meant fashionable. That also makes some sense; many of the things that are most fashionable today are also ingenious or at least clever, like smartphones, wireless noise-cancelling headphones, and other…well,  nifty stuff. In fact you could use “nifty” in both senses at the same time. You might compliment someone on their nifty t-shirt and mean that it has a very clever slogan on the front, is made of an advanced, breathable synthetic fabric, and has embedded circuitry so the slogan lights up in the dark. Now that would be a nifty little trick.