An Irritating Pinoy Expression

Every time  I hear the expression "nice one", I simply want to pull my hair.   I have been hearing this everywhere and it just gets to my nerve each time.

I think this started sometime last year when my sister, my cousin and I were playing tennis.   Our neighbor (who we believe was drunk at that time) volunteered to join us.  Since he was drunk, he was very loud and rowdy on the court.  He kept saying "sorry" for shots that he missed, "anticipate" for the shots we missed, and "nice one" for the winners that we made.   

I was thinking to myself, what was nice about those shots?  Isn't nice one too generic?  Did he refer to the swing? Did her refer to the spin?  He could have said, "nice backhand" but I guess his brain was not cooperating with him at that time.  That is what you get for being drunk too early in the morning.

This is how "nice one" feature in most conversations I hear these days.

Person 1:  Napanood ko na yung Slumdog Millionaire

Person 2:  Nice one!  

Person 1:  Uy, may bagong boylet na si Carol

Person 2:  Nice one!

Person 1:  Sale sa Zara.

Person 2:  Nice one!

Seriously, nice one is like a virus that spreads like crazy these days.   For example, I posted a photo online, and a friend typed, "nice one".  I really wanted to reply, what is "one" referring to? Is it the background?  Is it the color of my shirt?  This same friend also commented "nice one" when I forwarded the http link to my blog.   I would like to think that this friend only used nice one in jest to tease me.  

We have a lot of words at our disposal, so why do we have to limit it to nice?  And why do we have to be vague about it by replacing the apt noun with the impersonal pronoun "one"?   Of course it is forgivable to hear that expression sometimes, but for it to be part of the everyday vocabulary with the same meaning as "cool" or "awesome" is just too much for me.

Des, my friend, in trying to analyze why I hate that expression so much, said I think what you hate about it is the intonation, that is, the stress is in the word nice.    Maybe.  

"Nice one" is now in the league of overused and abused expressions and words like "chillax", "fack shit" (yes, with an "A", not "U" as that is how pinoys pronounce it), and "what the fack"(with an "A" still).