BLAZON, BLASON | Differences in Pronunciation and Meaning

Pronunciation Lesson from Sir Henry
Bedingfeld, Bt. (center), September 2018.

EAST HAMPTON, 26 September – This is about the pronunciation of the word "blazon", a word that is at the very center of heraldry.

The blazon is a coat of arms reduced to words. From a blazon a scholar of heraldry can generate a "trick" – a black-and-white sketch of the coat of arms.

Then the heraldic artist, someone like my friend Lee Lumbley, can generate for you a colorful drawing of the coat.

The blason is different... But let's first focus on the blazon.

Two Pronunciations of Blazon

Most people who are not heraldic scholars pronounce the word "blazon" so that the first syllable is the same as the word blaze, or the first half of the word blazer, which has an Oxbridge origin. The Ur-blazer was the flaming red boating jacket of Lady Margaret Boat Club, named after Lady Margaret Beaufort. Beaufort founded St John's College, Cambridge and is the nominee of Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford. The first recorded reference to a blazer was in the 1852 Cambridge General Almanack and Register, says Jack Carlson, on pages 12 and 126 of Rowing Blazers (New York: The Vendome Press, 2014).

A couple of pronouncing dictionaries say that the word blazon should be pronounced BLAY-zun.

But heraldic scholars pronounce blazon more like a Frenchman would, BLAZ-un (the de-accenting of the second syllable is a common byproduct of the Anglicization of French words).

That's how, for example, Sir Henry Edgar Paston-Bedingfeld, Bt., of Oxburgh Hall, Norfolk pronounces it after a lifetime in the business. He was once Rouge Croix Pursuivant, York Herald, and then Norroy and Ulster King of Arms (the two Kings of Arms were separate until 1943). A long career in the College of Arms.

The first syllable of blazon, he confirms, is pronounced like the first syllable of the current Mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, with a short "a" as in black or blast.

So how should we pronounce it? If you are among the hoi polloi, blay-zun will probably pass without comment. If you are mixing with folk from the College of Arms, it is blaz-un.

A Blason Is Something Else

Meanwhile, I have come across the word blason, which is pronounced differently from blazon. Fewer people would be tempted to mispronounce, for two reasons: (1) fewer people know what it is in the first place, and (2) blason is a French term of art and would therefore be assumed to be pronounced with a short "a", as in "blasé", and with a full-throated "on" (as in garçon) at the end.

Blason is a form of poetry that originated with the heraldic blazon but took on a whole new specific meaning.  Both in France and in Holland (the Dutch term is blazoen), the word can refer to a description of a coat of arms or to the coat itself. It was used often to describe a "chamber of rhetoric", which was a dramatic society once popular in Belgium and Holland that had aspects of Japanese karaoke and community theater as well as welfare aspects associated with civic associations.

The term blason, along with related words, was used in 16th-century French literature by poets who followed in a tradition pioneered by Clément Marot in 1536.  The blason draws on the tradition of chivalry that is exemplified by the 14th-century book of poems of Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), Il Canzoniere. Petrarch addresses his poems to his beloved Laura, but doesn't describe her all at once, referencing only parts of her person, invariably with reverence and extravagant comparisons to something in nature, such as (to make up a couple of examples) "Your eyes are stars; they light up my night." Or: "Your lips are pools to dive for." It is still a device used often by precious poets and writers.

However, the extravagance of the French blason tradition became oppressive, and many post-Petrarchan voices emerged, of which three types endure:

• Extension to groups. One approach was to up the ante with the blason populaire, extending the extravagant praise to an entire culture or ethnic group, puffed up by belittling others. The original seems to have been a travel book by Alfred Canel, Blason Populaire de la Normandie (1859), in which Norman travelers scoff at the primitive culture of other regions. Samuel Johnson, for example, says in his dictionary: "The noblest prospect which a Scotsman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England!" In modern times, the blason populaire endures in Donald Trump, who seeks to elevate U.S. status by belittling that of foreign nationals, starting with but by no means limited to Mexicans and other Latin American citizens seeking to emigrate to the United States.
• Parody. Another prominent set of voices were the parodies. In the 16th-century parody, Don Quixote, Cervantes describes the adventures of a madman who decides he is a knight on a quest. The girl of his dreams is a local peasant girl, whom he calls Dulcinea. In her honor, Quixote devotes countless inflated assessments of her beauty. 
• Denial. Another approach is to attack the Petrarchan genre by denying its validity. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 rejects several Petrarchan clichés:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks,

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know,

That music hath a far more pleasing sound.

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.