[Gander5739]

A tangent, but this is the second time in two days I've seen the word spelled "often times" instead of "oftentimes". Is this some variant spelling I don't know of? I see it more than "oftentimes" now, which I was hitherto convinced was the only correct spelling.

[mister_mort]

I've never seen it spelled as "oftentimes".

[Gander5739]

But as far as I can determine, often times is a misspelling of oftentimes.

[ssl-3]

I believe you may be correct, but they're both readable-enough.

Like "cannot" vs "can not": One form may be more-correct, but both are very readable.

Either way, it's easy enough to blame spell check on our personal pocket supercomputers for these things.

(Every year or two, Google Keyboard on Android makes it its purpose to screw up "its" vs "it's". You type it the right way, you see it on the screen as being correct, and then it changes it to the wrong form. This happens 100% of the time and then the problem disappears in a few weeks.

I'd give Google a break, but they don't deserve one.

I also blame them single-handedly for the variations in spellings of brake-vs-break on the longer timeline: Sometimes, people get it right and nobody notices. Oftentimes, it's all backwards. The oscillation suggests that it is an auto-derp problem more than it is a cognitive one.)

[Gander5739]

Cannot and can not are slightly different in that both are correct (in the prescriptivist sense, I suppose; arguably whatever gets the point across is correct). But there are cases where can not is more correct.

I use a keyboard (Thumb-Key to be precise) without autocorrect, though it doesn't stop me from making typing mistakes.