beside the point vs optional

beside the point

adj
  • Irrelevant, moot. 

adv
  • Irrelevantly, off-topic. 

optional

adj
  • Not compulsory; left to personal choice; elective. 

noun
  • In various programming languages, a kind of variable that is assigned a specific data type but may or may not hold an actual value. 

  • Something that is not compulsory, especially part of an academic course. 

How often have the words beside the point and optional occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )