This is why the "nice" number is usually called "niceness": a job with a high niceness is very kind to the users of your system (i.e., it runs at low priority), while a job with little niceness utilises more of the CPU. The term "niceness" could be considered awkward. Unfortunately, it's the only term that is both accurate ("nice" numbers are used to compute the priorities but are not the priorities themselves) and avoids horrible circumlocutions ("increasing the priority means lowering the priority...").