Science communication

The last entry is la confiance dans la science, and the noun at the end of it has a relative in English that nobody would suspect. La science comes from Latin scientia, knowledge, built on scire, to know; the same verb sits inside la conscience, knowing together with oneself, and inside « prescience », knowing beforehand. Put a negative in front and Latin gave nescius, not knowing, ignorant. That word came down into Old French as nice, simple, foolish, easily fooled, and in that sense it crossed the Channel. Once in English it kept moving: from foolish to fussy, from fussy to precise — the sense still alive in « a nice distinction » and « a nice point of law » — and from precise to pleasant, where it stopped. French went the other way and let the word die; nice survives there only in older dictionaries, marked as out of use. So the two languages split the inheritance. French kept the knowing and dropped the ignorance; English kept both, and turned the ignorance into a compliment. Trust in science, on this reading, is trust in people who are not nice in the oldest sense.