"Oftentimes", indeed

The word "sometimes" has been around for a long time and is self-explanatory. It refers to something that happens on some occasions. "Some" is more than a few, and less than a lot. A moderate, smallish, reasonable number of times, then. Now imagine you want to refer to something that happens a bit more frequently than that. Often, perhaps. So you take the word "sometimes", rip out the "some" and replace it with "often" and get "oftentimes", even though "often" already means the same thing, and the combined word doesn't even make sense. Shouldn't it at least be "manytimes"? Depressingly, it seems the word appears in around 100 blogs per day, according to Technorati: