Shannon from Virginia Beach, Virginia, heard nitnoy in the Navy as a word for something small or insignificant, as in a nitnoy problem. The likeliest source is Thai nit-noi, meaning “a little bit,” with a plausible route through U.S. military service in Thailand during the Vietnam War and later Navy and other military communities. Curiously, the paper trail shows a slang dictionary with the unusual spelling nitnoid in 1994, and other printed uses seem to begin only in the late 1980s; if it truly came from the Vietnam War era, we should expect to see it in print earlier. A proposed blend of nitpick and annoy fits some uses, especially for petty bureaucratic hassles, but it sounds more like an after-the-fact explanation. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of ““Nitnoy” in U.S. Military Slang Likely Comes from Thai for a Little Bit”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
This is Shannon Hurley. I’m calling from Virginia Beach, Virginia.
Well, hello, Shannon.
Hi, Shannon. How are you doing?
Real good.
What’s up?
I just have a word that I’ve always been worried where it came from.
The word is nitnoy.
Nitnoy.
Nitnoy. How are you spelling that?
I would guess N-I-T-N-O-Y.
Maybe N-I-T-N-O-I-D. I’ve never seen it written.
And what does it mean?
Well, something small or insignificant, like a nitnoy problem.
Okay.
Do you have a memory of about when you learned it, like how many years ago?
I’m guessing probably 30 years ago.
30 years ago.
It seems to me, I remember as far as I’ve been in the Navy anyway, I joined right out of college.
That’s really, really, really, really, really interesting to me.
So interesting.
You know why this is interesting?
Why is that?
I only know of one slang dictionary, maybe two, I’ll asterisk that, but one slang dictionary that I can respect that has this word, and that’s Paul Dixon’s War Slang Dictionary.
And I believe the word in a very unusual spelling was in there from 1994 onward.
And he spelled it N-I-T-T-E-N-O-I-D, nitnoid, which is really weird.
Nobody else spells it that way.
The only other place I’ve seen it is Urban Dictionary, but we kind of don’t really count Urban Dictionary unless it’s the only place that has it.
But what’s crazy about this is it does mean small or tiny in the Thai language, but the American military hasn’t had a presence in Thailand since the Vietnam War.
And so even though this term is heavily associated with the military, like when I looked up uses of this, they kind of start in 1987 and they go forward to present day.
And I find them again and again from people who are in the military or they live and work in military communities or they’re part of the government that associates with the military in some way.
There’s this gap then between the end of the Vietnam War, when we might have had soldiers pick up the term from Thai speakers, to 1987 when it first appears in print, as far as I know.
And that gap is really unusual.
We would have expected it to kind of appear right away like so much other language that we got from the Vietnam War.
That would make sense why it would have gone from people who were stationed in Thailand during the Vietnam War to, and then they get stationed elsewhere in Japan and the Philippines, and it eventually just percolates its way among the military population.
The only other competing theory that is worth pointing out doesn’t have anything to do with the Thai language at all.
And it’s the idea that maybe it’s a combination of nitpick and annoy.
Because on a lot of the uses of this term, it is like exactly like you said, it’s a small problem.
So it’s a small thing that’s annoying.
Or in a couple of cases I’ve seen people refer to the nit noise of bureaucracy.
Like all the things, the paperwork that you have to fill out and the approvals that you have to get and the hoops you have to jump through in order to get funding or to get your program approved or to move forward to the next step.
But that sort of has the ring of folk etymology or some kind of after-the-fact etymology, right?
Yeah, it very much sounds like a made-up story after the fact.
And it reminds me of the term skosh, too, which our soldiers picked up from in Japan, right?
From a word that means a little bit.
Yep, just a skosh.
I’m very familiar with that word, too.
The one other fact that I want to throw in here, for what it’s worth, is that the dog of the ambassador to Vietnam at the time of the evacuation of Saigon was named Nitnoy.
Really?
Yeah.
Nitnoy was a black poodle, and he left with his master, Graham Martin, on one of the last helicopters to flee Saigon.
Interesting.
Yeah, so it’s possible that there’s a connection there.
I’m betting that’s a toy poodle and not a standard.
Probably a small poodle, yeah.
But I could see an ambassador naming, you know, name your dog after, you know, he’s in fun, of course.
Oh, what an annoyance.
He’s a little problem.
Well, he might have just been a little.
Nitnoi is sometimes used in Thailand as a nickname for people who are small or who are cute.
Yeah.
So it’s not necessarily derogatory in Thai at all.
It’s actually one of the standard words that you learn when you first live or work in Thailand.
You pick it up right away.
Interesting, because I have visited Thailand, but it was as a tourist.
It was only there for less than a week.
Interesting.
Well, I’ll tell you one thing that’s going to be really amazing, Shannon.
We have military communities listening to the show on both coasts.
I assume, and I count on, a flood of emails and phone calls of people telling us their experience with Nittanoi.
Well, hello to all the fellow military on both coasts.
There we go.
And we’ll find out more.
If they have the answer, we will soon get to the bottom of it.
All right?
Well, thank you very much.
I appreciate that.
Our pleasure.
Shannon, thank you so much.
Thank you for your call.
We really appreciate that.
Okay.
Take care now.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
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