A conflating of “non” and “controversy” to describe an incident or utterance that’s seen as wholly undeserving of any fuss.
The word has been around for years and extends beyond the political realm; back in 1998, New York Post sportswriter Tom Keegan dismissed the hubbub around baseball slugger Mark McGwire’s taking of over-the-counter drugs: “It’s not a controversy; it’s a nontroversy.” (This, of course, was years before McGwire admitted he took illegal steroids.) But it increasingly has been found a home in politics, thanks to the ability of Twitter and other social media to create and reinforce negative perceptions at blinding speed.
An April 2012 posting on Time’s website by James Poniewozik declared that year’s presidential campaign “the year of the nontroversy”: “Who’s nicer to dogs? Whose idiot supporters said more obnoxious things than the other guy’s idiot supporters? Who didn’t eat a cookie that it would have been more advisable for him to eat? These are some of the burning issues that have faced America as the general election of 2012 has gotten under way.”
More recently, Democrats have used it to trivialize things that fire up the GOP base, such as the Obama administration’s handling of the September 2012 attacks in Benghazi and implications that no scientific consensus exists on climate change. When some conservatives criticized President Obama for snapping a photo with other world leaders at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service in December 2013, Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart bemoaned: “Selfie-gate is one of those nontroversies that makes me see why people hate my profession.”