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Spotted in the wild:
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(From a posting on the American Dialect Society listserv.)
Surely “off-times” makes perfect sense as a pronunciation spelling for “oft-times”, simplifying the geminate /tt/ as is common for most American speakers (MWCD marks the first /t/ as optional).
Semantically, however, the reanalysis is a bit more puzzling to me. I would think that replacing the archaic/poetic “oft” element with the more common “off” might alter the sense somewhat — from ‘frequently’ to ‘occasionally’ or ‘intermittently’ (evoking not just the hiatal sense of “off-time” but also “off-and-on”, “on again, off again”, etc.).
A Google search on “off(-)times” doesn’t really bear out my hunch, though perhaps one could discern a subtle semantic shift going on.
And it appears that “off-” is replacing “oft-” in other compounds where no geminate /tt/ is involved, such as “oft-repeated” > “off-repeated” or “oft-quoted” > “off-quoted”.
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The substitution pique>peak is very common. It also makes much sense, once the verb _peak_ is equipped with a causative sense and allowed to take a second argument (an object complement), just like _walk_ in “walk the dog” or _grow_ in “grow potatoes”.
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Wasting away, in one’s stomach region, has become the epitome of physical beauty.
Update, 2006/03/12: On 2006/03/11, Wilson Gray reported _pantie waste_ to the American Dialect Society mailing list:
> A while ago, a friend of mine spoke somewhat as follows:
>
> “I don’t what made that jerk think that I would possibly want to sleep with him. That would have been a total [pAntiweist]!”
>
> I asked her how that last word was spelled. She replied:
>
> “P-A-N-T-I-E W-A-S-T-E.”
>
> I asked her what that meant. She replied that it meant that said jerk wasn’t worth the effort involved in taking off one’s undies.
>
> After a bit more conversation, it became clear that what she had in mind was “pantywaist,” misconstrued and respelled to fit that misconstruction.
>
> For those too young to have worn a pantywaist, it was clothing for (male) toddlers. It consisted of a pair of short pants - the panties - worn over one’s diaper and buttoned along its top edge to the bottom edge of a Peter Pan-collared shirt - the waist - that itself buttoned up the front.
>
>From its use as clothing for babies comes its former(?) pejorative use as
an insult for an adult male.
This eggcorn is found in the spellings _pantywaste_, _panty waste_, _pantiewaste_ or _pantie waste_, with the first appearing to be the most common. Others, too, have opted for the altered spelling on similar grounds:
* You deserve some kind of formal recognition for using the word “pantywaist” in your blog. I have always wondered about the etymology of that word - and I actually thought that it was spelled “pantyWASTE”, so it took on kind of a mysterious and SIMULTANEOULY (haha) disgusting image in my mind…. (link)
* you mean pantywaste? is it supposed to be pantywaist?
i always thought it was like you’re a waste and also i called you women’s underwear (link)
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From counting Google hits, _little lone_ seems to be slightly more common than _little own_. Even though the meaning of _lone_ and _own_ is quite different, we have entered both variants into the same entry: the salient part of the semantical reanalysis seems to be _little_, ie a lack or low degree.
Several of the examples show that the substitution of what would have to be seen as an adjective for the formulaic _let alone_ gives can lead the writer into serious syntactic difficulties, which are resolved more or less felicitously.