Ninny — that soft, smiling, self-effacing, apologetic fellow, the type who is terribly sorry when you happen to step on his foot, the kind you can borrow money from in the certainty he will never demand you repay it. — John D. MacDonald (1962).
A person who is unrealistically optimistic, or a Pollyanna and who might seem to prefer to retreat from difficult situations by professing seemingly irrelevant platitudes, rather than to directly engage with the difficulty at hand in a meaningful way