Mea Culpa: We have strayed into unknown territory without a charter

We have entered unchartered territory a few times recently. I have been away, so am still catching up with this quotation from former pensions minister Ros Altmann on 26 July: “Markets don’t like uncertainty, and we are clearly in unchartered territory.” Thanks to Paul Edwards for pointing it out.

A map can be a chart, but a charter is a written description of rights or functions, or the hiring of a plane or other vehicle. Both words come from Latin charta, paper, and “uncharted” sounds similar to “unchartered”, but the meanings are distinct. It is possible that Baroness Altmann misspoke, but then we should have corrected her – sorry, I mean we should have rendered her words in accordance with our style.

We did it again the next day, with a headline: “UK entering ‘unchartered territory’ of Islamophobia after Brexit vote.” You could conceive of a territory that was granted by charter to a person or group, but that is not what the common metaphor means: it means territory that has not been mapped, and therefore a situation for which we have no precedents or rules to guide us.

Hidden wiring: An article syndicated from The Washington Post on Tuesday used a common metaphor from computing. Trying to explain why women are more selective than men on Tinder, the dating app, it said: “The gap between male and female selectivity can be attributed to some mix of inherited, deep-seated social norms and hard-wired evolution.”

Hardwired connections (our style is not to hyphenate) are permanent, as opposed to those made or changed by computer programmes depending on the information given. It is almost as hackneyed as saying that something is “in so-and-so’s DNA”, a different analogy often applied to the same sort of thing.

In this case, it is not only a cliché but reduces the sentence to meaninglessness: the gap can be attributed to a combination of nurture and nature.

Horsing about: While we are on the subject of hackneyed phrases, I discovered only recently that the archaic verb “hackney” comes from the Middle English, meaning an ordinary horse, “as opposed to a war horse or draught horse”, says the Oxford Dictionary. It is “probably from Hackney in east London, where horses were pastured”, hence hackney carriage or coach. The verb means “to use a horse for ordinary riding”, which later became “to make commonplace by overuse”.

Now I know.