Eggcorn Forum

Somehow it seems like we must have discussed this somewhere, but my search skills are rusty. It is not a highly likely typo (though I type t and f with the same finger on my qwerty board I tend to stretch less, not more, to type that second f.) Oft is of course quite old-fashioned, and some people like to use such words when they are trying to say something impressive.
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I have several entries that share this substitution. A first one may be legitimate oldspeak, and does not clearly mean “off and on”, like I wish it did, but I’ll include it anyway.

For oft anon had he been told By gypsies, wandered on the fen That by the knight that scarlet bled Would he be led to some foul den; Wherein great marvels

The next is more clearly malapropish if not eggcornish: an oft chance is one you can expect to show up fairly often. (There may be some influence from an odd chance as well.) There are quite a few examples:

Marie ralphs into the hushes while Sadie holds her hair, and I wander back up to look at the band through the window, just on the oft chance that Doug is singing …

don’t be so quick to dismiss their perception of you on the oft chance that they may actually see you both inside and out.

And on the oft chance that I can fit the building into the frame, it is severely distorted due to the wide-angle lens.

The third one also shows up quite a bit, and it is striking how many hits have to do with descriptions of music or some other performance/art that is trying to be striking and precedent breaking. I think it must be standard for some who use it:

“Assassins” is an oft-kilter carnival of American infamy. Sondheim musical is chillingly effective at Players Guild.

The episode where meth and red make ludacris rap on this terrible oft kilter beat and ludacris still kills it

here was a photographer taking an oft-kilter look at a group of outsiders, his photography transcending straight documentary into serious art.

Blondie was so ahead of the curve with Debbies oft kilter rhymes and funky fresh-new wave backing track.

songs of loneliness and increasing mental agitation, with oft-kilter arrangements purposefully undermining the songs’ commercial and melodic appeal.

to hound the Huskies into an oft-kilter performance for a program that’s won more titles than any team in women’s basketball history.

He discussed his thoughts on mass shootings in America, his opposition to the COVID-19 vaccine mandates, and other oft-kilter topics.

stereotype of an oft-kilter child from a broken home just waiting to escape adolescence, she instead plays Eun-hee as more inscrutable,

Kilter is a pretty weird word. I think I think of it as meaning something like proper balance or order, but I only use it in the phrases off (-) kilter and out of kilter . Kilter doesn’t feel , in isolation, like it ought to mean something so positive. Somebody could easily take it as meaning “off-balance, awkward” and think that the phrase oft-kilter represents the condition as typically occurring often.
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A singleton parallel: off whack and out of whack for me are pretty close synonyms for off/out of kilter , and whack also does not sound like a positive condition.

My oft whack processing seems to have turned a 175 into an oil painting. And without use of an oil painting filter. Odd.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2023-05-09 17:00:19)