Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
English speakers have been using the phrase “off chance” since the late nineteenth century. Anything “off chance” is unlikely, improbable. Today we generally embed the phrase in the idiom “on the off chance (that),” which means “just in case (that).”
At over 250 different web sites users have substituted “oft chance” for “off chance.” Three samples:
From a medical blog: “My partner attends coding conferences where he is told that insurance companies will not open their mail on Thursday or Friday on the oft chance that a claim will lapse.” (http://cut-to-cure.blogspot.com/2004/06 … -woes.html)
Comment on a movie database site: “Oh, and on oft chance these video inspire you to make your own Butterknife-themed clip, upload it to YouTube and leave a link in the comments to this post.” (http://www.spout.com/films/324635/default.aspx)
Audio forum: “So the question is what vintage speakers would you want or recommend on the oft chance I stumble across a pair?” (http://forums.audioreview.com/showthread.php?t=25267)
Replacing “off chance” with “oft chance” would seem at first glance to be a poor way of getting one’s message across. Something that is an “oft chance,” i.e., “a chance that happens more often,” would be something likely to happen, not something unlikely. But there are two interpretations of “oft chance” that bring the altered phrase closer in meaning to “off chance.” The speaker using “on the oft chance” might mean that what is in purview is “often chancy.” Or they could mean that something is “often just a matter of chance.” If the speaker intends one of these two codings, then “oft chance” presents an alternate and parallel imagery for the phrase “off chance.” It would be an eggcorn.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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I agree with kem’s quite clever analysis – the “unlikely” element of off chance seems to be displaced from off (because? although?) it is present in chance. Either “often chancy” or “often mere chance” can potentially contribute this sense.
The first example above, though (“on the oft chance that a claim will lapse”), might actually mean the opposite of off chance. That is, insurance companies might (according to doctors’ suspicions) avoid opening mail at the end of the week because it becomes slightly more likely (more often the chance) that a policy will expire over the weekend.
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