‘Sparks,’ said my husband, after a short pause. I had asked him what one could spark. His answer was true but not all that helpful.
I had come across a headline on the BBC News website that said: ‘Record hot March sparks “unchartered territory” fears.’ The inverted commas around unchartered territory were not meant as so-called sneer-quotes, but to indicate quotation. Later the same day the headline was amended to uncharted and sparks was jettisoned.
There is such a word as unchartered. My distant relation by marriage, William Wordsworth, used it in his ‘Ode to Duty’, the one that begins: ‘Stern Daughter of the Voice of God!’ It is not among his fruitier numbers, I think. One of its couplets goes: ‘Give unto me, made lowly wise,/ The spirit of self-sacrifice.’ The poet asks for the aid of moral law, otherwise he finds, ‘Me this unchartered freedom tires;/ I feel the weight of chance-desires.’ It isn’t that he lacks a map or chart but that, like a chartered accountant, he wants a legal deed or charter ruling him.
You’ll remember that when Britain first, at heaven’s command, arose from out the azure main, this was the charter of the land. So Britain was never unchartered territory nor, implicitly, uncharted territory. If it were otherwise, fears might well be sparked. Fears are precisely the sort of things that are sparked. In providing the connotations of spark, as a verb, the Oxford English Dictionary suggests: ‘to be the immediate cause of (something hard to control)’.
Other verbal annoyances continue unabated. On Radio 4, I heard Scarlett Maguire, a political pollster, refer to a two-year anniversary (which I’d call a second anniversary).
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