Nice

[Jonathon Green]

This would seem to be a transatlantic cousin, even descendant, of the
UK's 'nice one!', often modified as 'nice one, my son'. This in turn
seems to have emerged from the 1970s soccer chant, dedicated to the
Tottenham Hotspur player Cyril Knowles. It ran thus:

Nice one, Cyril
Nice one, son
Nice one Cyril
Let's have another one!

The 'one' being a goal. (BTW, the north-London club Tottenham Hotspur,
for those who appreciate the grim persistence of such things, are
sometimes known among rival supporters who refer to the club's
supposedly high- percentage of Jewish fans, as 'The Yids'.)

The phrase, as it is in the chant, is used when someone has performed
some action worthy of acclaim and soon spread beyond the soccer world,
being used with and latterly without the 'Cyril'.

'Nice' as a term of congratulatory approval by itself is also reasonably
common in the UK. I don't know whether the BBC-TV comedy series The Fast
Show,  has made it to PBS (it wouldn't have been picked up anywhere
else, I would imagine) but this series, first aired in the 1990s,
assembled a number of sketches featuring a 'cast' of stock characters.
one of whom was a supposed jazz critic, whose response to any piece of
music, was invariably 'Nice!', the 's' being heavily sibilant.

Jonathon Green