Do sparks really fly?

‘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.’