It seems that the end of the year, with all the football games, is a great time for this one.

“Unchartered waters.”

If a team is going into a playoff game with a quarterback who has never played in one, it’s said the team is heading into “unchartered waters.”

Or, perhaps, it’s the first time a team has played an overtime in a bowl game. Well then, it’s entering “unchartered territory.”

While dictionaries work harder than they should to come up with an actual definition of “unchartered” (i.e., “not having a charter or constitution”), the word we want to be using here is “uncharted – as in, “not previously mapped,” “unexplored,” “unfamiliar,” or “unknown.”

And yes, I’m sure I’m not just hearing it wrong. They are, almost without exception, saying “unchartered.”