Written in Heraldry

The formal art of describing a coat of arms is quite funny, eg "Party per pale argent and vert, a tree eradicated counterchanged". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blazon

There's an actual formal grammar for it together with an image generator in ocaml (paper in french: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00640989, demo: https://www.irif.fr/~eleph/Recherche/Hrld/img-dbs/index.html)

My favorite coat of arms is from Austria-Hungary: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ed/Au...

My favorite bit of heraldry is how the coat of the UK crown changes depending on where it is: IIRC there is a facing lion in Scotland instead of the rampant lion + unicorn in England, and the quarters on the shield are different too.

In my family we have known of a coat of arms in our name for some time, so I was surprised to find that Amazon was selling bags, sweatshirts, etc. with a very different coat of arms also attributed to my family name.

After some digging, I found out they are using a military insignia given by the king to one of his noble captains with my name. The insignia would be something like a flag to identify his army on the field, So I guess there are many uses for coats of arms.

I have much to learn about heraldry, I'd appreciate any references I could read.

I served as a kingdom herald when I was active in the Society for Creative Anachronism a few years ago. Learning blazon (the descriptive language of heraldry) was a lot of fun - the rigid syntax with its DRY goal of describing armory with as little repetition as possible reminded me somewhat learning a programming language.

My own arms: Per bend azure and argent, a rabbit's head erased counterchanged.

If only modern tech could allow an article on something visual present that to the reader. I wish browser could be allowed to include images alongside text.

(This is the bane of so many articles on the net these days. It's like CMS systems everyone uses only allow you to set a single image, and that's it)