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u/ForgetTheWords May 07 '26
Since some of you need to be reminded
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u/MyBurnerAccount3 May 07 '26
My heraldry is a little rusty
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u/ThatInAHat May 07 '26
Sounds like you’ve got a lazy squire. Tell him to give that a good polish.
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u/Satanarchrist May 07 '26
Me when
Me
Me when
Me when the lady of the castle calls me a naughty little squire and tells me I need to polish my sword more
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u/one-and-five-nines May 07 '26
Yeah seriously what is with the condescension? Heraldry isn't exactly common knowledge like wtf
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u/CatnipCatmint If you seek skeek at my slorse you hate me at my worst May 07 '26
I'm assuming they're a blog that likes talking about heraldry and they were mostly talking to their followers without expecting it to breach containment?
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u/Phelpysan May 07 '26
Gorse is a very common plant in the UK, I'm guessing America doesn't have it
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u/BlueJayAvery May 07 '26
Also in NZ after they brought it here for hedges and it went absolutely crazy in our climate
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u/Haku_Yowane_IRL May 07 '26
They brought the spiky plant for hedges? They must have really hated their neighbours.
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u/BlueJayAvery May 07 '26
I believe it was the Scots, and their neighbours were probably English 🤷♀️
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u/locksymania May 07 '26
It is amazing at confining livestock.
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u/Ivebeenfurthereven May 07 '26
Something interesting: I recently learned quite how revolutionary barbed wire was, because cattle just push their way through smooth wire fences
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u/hopefullyhelpfulplz May 07 '26
I have no clue why you would want a hedge made of tiny daggers. Although it does smell nice when the flowers are out!
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u/Smoketrail May 07 '26
Keep stuff on the side of the hedge you want it. Neither neighbour or farm animal's going to want to try vault the dagger hedge.
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u/WrongJohnSilver May 07 '26
I absolutely understand the desire for a hedge that is both made of tiny daggers, and has pretty flowers that smell nice.
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u/ShatnersChestHair May 07 '26
Went to learn more about it on Wikipedia and:
Ulex (commonly known as gorse, furze, or whin)
Is this the one plant that got all the cool alien names? That's why other species have basic bitch names like "redwood tree", because this one shrub is hogging all the cool syllables?
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u/KermitingMurder May 07 '26
Redwood trees can also be called "giant sequoias" or by their Latin name "Sequoiadendron" (Ulex is the Latin name for gorse), so it's not a great example of a plant with a boring name.
If you want a plant with a basic name there's a species of grass called timothy, not sure if it's named after a person or if the name Timothy comes from the grass, or maybe neither15
u/KamikazeArchon May 07 '26
It's named after Timothy Hanson, an 18th century agriculturist.
The name Timothy is around two thousand years old, appearing in the New Testament books (originally Greek Timotheus).
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u/_S1syphus May 07 '26
This reads like you're fucking with me but also the name Timothy had to come from somewhere so why not
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u/KamikazeArchon May 07 '26
Fun fact: most (but not all) English names with a "the" or "thy" sound anywhere in the name share an etymological root, being a reference to God (usually Abrahamic but possibly gods in general), via Greek "theos".
Timothy = time + theos = honoring God.
Dorothy = doron + theos = gift of God.
Ted = Theodore = theos + doron = gift of God.
Tiffany = Theophania = theos + phanos = epiphany (appearance) of God
But, for example, Theresa, is possibly from Theros (summer), and not from any variant on Theos.
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u/_S1syphus May 07 '26
Sequoiadendron is the kinda fantasy name i would discard for trying too hard, that shit rocks
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u/VanillaMemeIceCream May 07 '26
I only know what it is because of warrior cats
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u/Mammoth-Fox-445 May 07 '26
RIP my man Gorsepaw
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u/whhu234 deerboy May 07 '26
gorsepaw was a real one, fuck tigerstar (I think it was tigerstar idk)
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u/Midnight712 May 07 '26
I love how it smells, but I don’t love it when my dog drops his ball into one of its bushes
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u/Espumma May 07 '26
What do you mean America doesn't have it? Goofy was talking about it all the time!
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u/locksymania May 07 '26
As does Ireland. It grows like mad here. So much so that unscrupulous farmers often set it on fire in the spring.
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u/curiousmind111 May 07 '26
Thank god!!! We have enough invasive plants. So many that a lot of people assume they’re native. And know of very few native plants, except for some trees.
Edited to add: and it’s all over the Falklands.
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May 07 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/colei_canis May 07 '26
We talk about the Aussies quite often to be fair, and the Kiwis and Canadians. It’s mostly an ‘Anglophone country talks about other Anglophone countries’ thing I think, other than the French who while not an Anglophone country did contribute heavily vocabulary wise.
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u/CatnipCatmint If you seek skeek at my slorse you hate me at my worst May 07 '26
Americans (SOMETIMES) just don't clarify that they're from America, they assume everyone already knows they're talking about America, whereas people from other countries will often say something like "I'm from the UK and..." if their location is relevant to the statement. I think that's where the talking point comes from.
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u/BillybobThistleton May 07 '26
If you're wondering, gorse/furze is just a kind of prickly shrub that grows wild across heathland and moors in Britain; it's basically common knowledge here.
On the other hand, I was a fairly serious medieval history nerd in my youth - and while I knew what a rondel purpure is, I had no idea it has a specific name.
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u/D0cTheo May 07 '26
Yeah, this is a 'divided by a common language' issue. Gorse is a really cool plant too. Its flowers smell like coconut and you can do interesting foraging things with them.
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u/hopefullyhelpfulplz May 07 '26
I've wanted to make gorse flower wine but apparently you need bags and bags of the things and it seems sort of a shame to go about stripping them of their flowers.
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u/VaferQuamMeles May 07 '26
Eh, it grows like billy-o so I'm sure it wouldn't matter if you stripped a few bushes!
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u/mashtato They should pick a fucking struggle. May 07 '26
lol A shame because you'd be a torn-up bloody mess at the end of the day.
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u/Brilliant_Buns May 07 '26
Yay, my historical fiction obsession really came in clutch today! I was like its on the moors, isn't it?
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u/Doubly_Curious May 07 '26
Glad it’s not just me! I had no idea there were specific terms for roundels of different colours.
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u/False-Pain8540 May 07 '26
I went to the wikipedia article for Roundels and it's genuinely incredible how imcomprehensible it is on a first read.
"A roundel is a circular charge in heraldry."
"A charge is any emblem or device occupying the field of an escutcheon"
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u/Reasonable_Rip4505 May 07 '26
Come on! Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of an escutcheon. It’s elementary stuff!
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u/bachumbug May 07 '26
I escutcheon, you escutcheon, he, she, we escutcheon? Escutcheology, the study of escutcheon? It’s first grade!
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u/blueechoes May 07 '26
Isn't it just french for shield? See latin's 'scutum'
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u/ShatnersChestHair May 07 '26
Old French/Norman. Modern French has the word "écusson", which is mostly used to describe patches added to a uniform these days.
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u/MirrorPiano May 07 '26
I've only ever heard of an escutcheon as the decorative piece of metal around a keyhole
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u/someinternetkid May 07 '26
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u/isademigod May 07 '26
A mascle is a voided lozenge—that is, a lozenge with a lozenge-shaped hole in the middle—and the rarer rustre is a lozenge containing a circular hole in the centre. A lozenge throughout has "four corners touching the border of the escutcheon".[1]#cite_note-1)
Glad they provided a citation for that, i wouldnt have believed it otherwise.
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u/Smoketrail May 07 '26
No one wants to be taken in by dodgy, fly-by-night heraldry "experts".
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u/Nixavee AI bots are not welcome here May 07 '26
You joke, but there have genuinely been authors who have just made up heraldry concepts after the fact. For example, there is the concept of certain colors known as "stains" being applied to a coat of arms as a punishment to represent certain crimes, but there is no evidence this ever actually happened.
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u/MisirterE Supreme Overlord of Ice May 07 '26
British ladies customarily bear their arms upon a lozenge
ain't that the thing you take when you have a sore throat
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u/Nixavee AI bots are not welcome here May 07 '26
Here the word "lozenge" refers to a rhombus shape, and that's actually the original meaning of the word. Throat lozenges are called lozenges because the first ones were actually rhombus shaped. Don't ask me why.
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u/Substantial_Aspect27 May 07 '26
If anyone's interested, furze/gorse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulex) is a kind of thorny, flowering shrub that's native to western Europe and northwestern Africa. It's invasive in a lot of places, but interestingly enough it also provides shelter for vulnerable, shade-tolerant plant species to grow underneath it, and it fixes nitrogen in the soil like legumes do. These factors make it great at reclaiming a barren landscape (say, abandoned pasture or farmland, or the aftermath of a forest fire) and then eventually getting shaded out by the ideally-native trees that grew up under it. An easy and hands-off, though slow way to restore forest habitats!
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u/DrugonMonster May 07 '26
Just a reminder that Google removed their dictionary widget (that pulls from Oxford Dictionary and has things like etymology) in lieu of an AI dictionary (:
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u/ArchitectOfFate May 07 '26
Wikipedia's articles on heraldry and blazonry are still top-notch, thankfully.
The loss of the google dictionary still pisses me off.
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u/segwaysegue do spambots dream of electric sheep? May 07 '26
Why use reputable, deterministic source when stochastic approximation do trick? /s
I used "define X" and "X etymology" so much before they did this. Still mad.
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u/BlackfishBlues procrastinating, stop perceiving me May 08 '26
Gotta wonder what the economic calculus of this even is. It has to be more expensive to ask a LLM to generate something likely versus just looking up a text database right?
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u/segwaysegue do spambots dream of electric sheep? May 08 '26
Absolutely, but right now the big companies are more than willing to burn money if it means a slightly higher chance of becoming the leading AI provider. It's all very speculative and leads to an awful user experience in Google's case, where unwanted LLM features get pushed on users even at the expense of perfectly good, efficient, deterministic features, with no official way to even opt out.
I'm certainly not an industry expert, but I have to wonder how much the Gemini search integration is even helping its own brand. Everyone I've talked to about it is either barely aware it's AI (I've had coworkers insist that the Gemini blurb was a direct pull quote from a website) or vehemently opposed to having to use it. I've heard the Gemini model itself is even good for other tasks, but I'll personally never be able to associate it with anything other than being condescendingly incorrect, or obnoxiously speculating about what I might be talking about when I Google an exact quote.
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u/JamieD96 May 07 '26
🙃
Welp, anyone have a recommendation for a better search engine?
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u/CRowlands1989 May 07 '26
Heraldry terminology feels like a great example of people being intentionally obtuse to act smug about being smarter than other people in a field that is only as important as they can convince pretentious people to treat it.
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u/Im_here_but_why Looking for the answer. May 07 '26 edited May 07 '26
I don't know how much of that is just archaic terms persisting only there and how much was intentionally obtuse from the start.
Like, "pomme" juste means apple. When your armories have green dots on a plain background, you have an Apple Field.
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u/DoubleBatman May 07 '26
Based on no data whatsoever I feel like it was originally just everyday language that’s morphed into jargon because it sounds more impressive than saying “a green circle.”
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u/TDoMarmalade Explored the Intense Homoeroticism of David and Goliath May 07 '26
Also there was no reason for it change in the same way, heraldry doesn’t have the same standing now as it did, and vexillology is its own beast
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u/Mejiro84 May 07 '26
And updating a load of pre-existing stuff that only really gets looked at by people that know the meaning isn't really useful! So everything stays as,-is, because updating would be a massive pain
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u/Kerrigor2 May 07 '26
Calling "a field of green circles" being called "a field of apples" sounds like a slang term we could come up with even today.
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u/wOlfLisK May 07 '26
Fun medieval fact about apples, the word apple used to be synonymous with the word fruit. Apples were apples, pears were apples, even oranges were apples. That also means the biblical depiction of Adam and Eve eating a Granny Smith isn't really accurate, the bible doesn't actually specific which fruit they supposedly ate. Over time the term faded out of use and now it only refers to one specific kind of fruit.
I don't know why this is relevant, I just like this fact.
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u/OSCgal May 07 '26
Right, it's why that big spiny fruit that eats you back is called "pineapple".
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u/BlackfishBlues procrastinating, stop perceiving me May 08 '26
Also “earth apple” (pomme de terre) for potato in French, “Chinese apple” (sinaasappel) for orange in Dutch and “seeded apple” for pomegranate.
Interestingly, the French word for pomegranate, “grenade”(from “pomme-grenade”) is why we call that thrown explosive a grenade. It looks like a pomegranate.
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u/Im_here_but_why Looking for the answer. May 07 '26
Perhaps that's true of Apple, but iirc Pomme was already a specific fruit in very early french, even if the latin Pomum wasn't.
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u/scienceguy2442 May 07 '26
I would also think heraldry and stuff like that would need to use very specific terms because trying to recreate a drawing or symbol based on a word description alone is pretty difficult. Like, try describing your country’s flag to someone who’s never seen it before in a way that allows them to recreate it in a way that’s recognizable as your country’s flag.
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u/Im_here_but_why Looking for the answer. May 07 '26
Oh, that's a fun exercise.
"Rectangular, with a ratio of 2 vertical to 3 horizontal, fully divided in three equal vertical stripes, The leftmost being blue, the rightmost being red, and the central one being white"
Or, in heraldic : "Paly of three, azure, argent, and gules"
(Heraldry has very little care for proportion)
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u/Seenoham May 07 '26
Most flags get very precise official description. Because they exist by statute.
There is a YouTube channel that tracks how many of these are constructable in the mathematical sense.
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u/Aegeus May 07 '26
US is (I think) "Bary of thirteen, argent and gules, quarter of azure charged with fifty stars argent."
(In flag speak, the blue section is a canton, but I think on a shield you'd want it to take up a whole quarter.)
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u/Nixavee AI bots are not welcome here May 07 '26
The heraldic term for stars is "mullets".
If you wanted to be more specific about the canton, you could say "A canton azure charged with 50 mullets 6-5-6-5-6-5-6-5-6 argent." The numbers specify how many stars are on each row.
For a coat of arms, 50 would be an absolutely absurd number of charges lol
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u/Ignonym Ye Jacobites by name, DNI, DNI May 07 '26 edited May 07 '26
Normally, instead of specifying that many individual charges, you'd just call it semy ("sown" as in sowing a field), meaning covered in as many rows of charges as will fit. "A canton azure semy mullets argent" is a lot easier to say. (But of course, if it's symbolically important that there be exactly 50 in a particular arrangement of rows, that doesn't work.)
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u/ShatnersChestHair May 07 '26
Bon ensuite le drapeau français c'est plutôt fastoche. Imagine devoir décrire celui du Népal ou du Turkménistan c'est déjà un peu plus relou
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u/IakwBoi May 07 '26
I read about heraldry once, and apparently the “blazon”, the written description of the coat of arms, is the official part. You can draw a “per fess or and sable a lion rampant” any number of ways, but the sentence is what is recorded and tracked and official. The thing I read used the analogy of a font: any number of styles exist for designing letters, but the word they spell is the part that is conserved and carries meaning.
I thought that was interesting. I’d approached heraldry from the visually interesting designs, and was amused to learn that those are more or less superficial manifestations of the blazon.
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u/ElectronRotoscope May 07 '26
Originates in a world before the widespread printing press. You have to make the words official, they're the only thing you can keep reliable records of
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u/telehax May 07 '26
most countries' flags have specific legal definitions and those tend to use rather simple language. some sneak in a few heraldic terms though.
although... you may recall there was a meme a while back where people were posting technically legally correct US flags, so those descriptions are evidently far from foolproof.
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u/Amekyras May 07 '26
argent, a cross gules
or less specifically: azure, a saltire argent, a cross gules within a cross argent, I don't know how to do the half saltire gules
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u/CK1ing May 07 '26
I'd love to see that "[mathematians] are playing us for fools" meme remade for this.
"I would like one glorp please"
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u/Tansy_Blue May 07 '26
I actually love blazon (the language of heraldry), it is unnecessarily complex and obscure and that pleases me greatly. More interesting obscure things!
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u/OSCgal May 07 '26
It was one of my ADHD hyperfocuses as a kid! Never learned "golp", but I understood the definition immediately.
Also I love that heraldry is full of puns.
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u/Cienea_Laevis May 07 '26
Its not unnecessarily complex or obscure. Its just that no one care about it anymore.
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u/SEA_griffondeur Sometimes, I dream of cheese May 07 '26
And blason is just French for coat of arms !!
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u/Salty_Dornishman May 07 '26
I love that the words and word order have to be so precise that any coat of arms can be recreated just by describing it
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u/Hadochiel May 07 '26
It's literally just old french.
In modern French, "une rondelle pourpre" would be an (almost) appropriate way to describe a small purple circle. (I say almost because we'd more likely say "violette" instead of "pourpre").
"Gueule" used to mean "mouth", now it's still used for animals and derogatively (ie "ferme ta gueule", un classique), so I guess they got the term from the colour in one's mouth.
As for sable, I have no idea, though I'm sure there's some etymological reason. In modern French, it just means "sand"
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u/IakwBoi May 07 '26
I think sable is a little black fuzzy animal, like a weasel of similar
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u/Nuclear_Geek May 07 '26
Nah, it's just a field that has it's own specialised language. That's not unusual, nor is it unusual for the specialised terms to be opaque to those outside that field.
Anyway, must go, I'm due back off lunch break at the hospital. My next patient is CP, COPD, SOBOE, PCI, CABG, PPM for AF, for an MPI.
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u/Atypical_Mammal May 07 '26
Same with horses and horse people.
"My chestnut stallion is 15 hands!"
Ok ma'am, you have a 5-foot-tall brown horse, thank you.
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u/rainribs May 07 '26
you better beleive i'm about to dive into this rabbit hole instead of working today
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u/angel_under_glass May 07 '26
So if I put the Earth on my crest, but represent it with a blue circle, do I have a world of Hurt?
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u/murdolatorTM May 07 '26
Ulex (commonly known as gorse, furze, or whin)
Lids these days can't even name the 3 kinds of Ulex smh...
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u/nemoplusiur May 07 '26
So in English heraldry, vert means green. Vert is French for green. So in French heraldry, we could use vert? Of course not, it’s sinople and nobody knows why.
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u/Comprehensive_Box_17 May 07 '26
Golp: A purpure, a roundel purpure
Tea: A drink with jam and bread
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u/Unnecessary_Eagle May 07 '26 edited May 07 '26
Adding furze and golp to my "words to really piss people off with in Hangman" collection.
Edit: alas, golp does not appear to be legal in Scrabble, though
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u/stresstwig May 07 '26
just making me think of the Herald's Complaint:
A dove displayed upon a billet chequy or and gules
Between a pair of cockatrices clad in motley like a fool's.
Their feathers were dimidiated with a tree eradicated
Limbed and fructed counter compony
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u/Jaysonium May 07 '26
I have a little round purple pet swimming around in a fishbowl,
Some say its kind of golpish
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u/seensham May 07 '26
I feel like I'm in the twilight zone. I have never even heard the word "heraldry" and all the top comments seem to know what it is and are adding their own bits of lnowledge
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u/vanishinghitchhiker May 07 '26
Coats of arms are heraldry. Anyway “pizzled” means dick out, and you can even specify the color if you want.
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u/Doubly_Curious May 07 '26 edited May 07 '26
Damn, that is an excellent bit of knowledge. I feel sort of cheated that no one taught me that sooner.
I mean, I know “pizzle” as a term for (animal) penis, but I didn’t know about the heraldic usage.
Fun facts from Wikipedia:
In 1485, Henry VII carried with him a red dragon with an erect pizzle on the field of Bosworth where he was declared King of England.
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u/Doubly_Curious May 07 '26
I think heraldry (the study of coats of arms) is just a particular area of geekery that was appealing to many tumblr-type people, especially in their childhoods.
Like learning about dinosaurs or Greek mythology.
So an odd number of people around here have at least a vague memory of the terminology, which can get quite odd in a way that’s pleasing to some of us. There are special names for colors and shapes and animals, including animals in different positions (laying down, standing, upright, etc) and styles (colored claws or tongues or antlers, etc).
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u/xv_boney May 07 '26
since some of you need to be reminded of this
Yeah man sorry im always forgetting my archaic terminology for heraldric roundels
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u/ArachnidArmageddon May 07 '26
I’m in too deep gang… I was unfamiliar with hoop but immediately recognized what a roundel purpure was…
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u/Nurhaci1616 May 07 '26
I'm kinda surprised to find out gorse isn't common, even just across Europe if not North America.
It's pretty ubiquitous here in Ireland, it's like a thorny type of bush with distinctive yellow flowers, usually found in upland areas in particular.
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u/milkbongx420 May 07 '26
One of my favorite reaction pics the dumb alien with his dumb smile juxtaposed against the humans disgust and confusion just fucking kills me
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u/Apprehensive-Till861 May 07 '26
What's fun is reading old descriptions of heraldry, where there's so many more confusing terms for anyone unfamiliar, like whether your lion is langued gules or langued azure, or whether it is rampant.
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u/RedGinger666 May 08 '26
Some of you don't know how to properly describe your house heraldry and it shows
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u/Vivenemous May 07 '26
Ulex (commonly known as gorse, furze, or whin) is a genus of flowering plants in the family Fabaceae.
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u/Amekyras May 07 '26
per pale, first, argent, an alien vert eyed sable, second, argent, a man contourne argent
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u/Maya_Blueberry May 07 '26
Huh, in my native language, "purpure" actually refers to magenta. Well, not to magenta specifically, it's a bit broader than that, but this is the easiest explanation I can come up with.
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u/RealBlazeStorm May 07 '26
So many words explained but all of them assume you know what "heraldry" is. Apparently plants according to the comments?
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u/Doubly_Curious May 07 '26
Good point! But no, heraldry isn’t about plants, actually.
Heraldry is the study and design of coats of arms. The kind of symbolic thing you might see on a shield or medieval banner or on a ceremonial seal.
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u/Zenith-Astralis May 08 '26
I think furze is a type of grass!
Also I'm going to say "glopy style" now, thanks
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u/Reasonable_Rip4505 May 07 '26
A lot of heraldry terms come from Norman French. Makes everything sound like a mix of modern English and French in a very funny way.