Assorted Afflatuses

One need not look further than France to realize that language is fluid and malleable. While a lexicographer might scoff at a word like "obeausity" or "splendiferous," people will, if the word sticks, call someone obeause or something splendiferous. The Académie française can insist French speakers use the "correct" term for email, "courriel," but, as the French have shown, such mandates can be blissfully ignored.

There is, however, one word whose usage has spiraled out of control recently and that has absolutely no function whatsoever in improving the English language. That malicious word is none other than "oftentimes."

Frankly, I find it astounding just how much the use of oftentimes has exploded. As an extremely corse and mostly unscientific measurement of oftentimes' use, I observed that a Google search for the string, "oftentimes 2008" garnered just over 2 million hits, whereas "oftentimes 2002" produced just over 1 million. Even taking into consideration the fact that, in all likelihood, more writing was published online in 2008 than 2002, the statistic astounds. The year 2008 has not even hit the halfway point in its march to December 31.

Of course, just because more people use a word does not necessarily mean it has no linguistic value. In most cases, a words' increased usage would tend to indicate it had more, not less value, as I implied. But, from my perspective, the word "oftentimes" has, in and of itself, no linguistic merit.

Oftentimes and its linguistic parent, often, have the exact same meaning: frequently. In fact, my dictionary defines oftentimes as often. As far as I am concerned, there is no reason to introduce an extra syllable if it adds no extra depth or meaning. It serves only to add extra and entirely superfluous weight to a sentence.

I suspect people use oftentimes for the same reason they employ utilize, rather than use: to sound academic, pretentious and authoritative. It is somewhat ironic, then, to learn that utilize and oftentimes actually have newer etymologies than their more "formal" counterparts. Use comes from the Old French verb user, whereas utilize comes from the much younger French verb, utiliser, which, as it happens is still used today. Often has its roots in Middle English, a derivative of oft, while the painfully long oftentimes comes from what my dictionary calls, "late Middle English," making it at least a few years younger its parent. So much for deriving authority from the ancients.

Even Thomas Jefferson, not someone with a reputation for penning concise or straightforward prose, kept his writing free of oftentimes' infectious presence. A search of the University of Virginia's Thomas Jefferson Digital Archive turned up exactly zero documents with the string "oftentimes." (Often, by contrast produced 21.) If Jefferson managed to live without that extra pretentious syllable, the rest of us can too.