Blazoning a New Line Style

[MenkAndemicael]

Hello!


In creating my arms I devised a line type to suggest Acacia thorns.
To my knowledge this hasn't been used before heraldically.

The line in question:



Currently I blazon it as épiné, but I don't believe that's correct french (confirmed by some friendly members of the Canadian Heraldic Authority, who are currently discussing the ideal blazoning themselves)
I've entertained calling it thorny, but I'm wondering if it might be easiest to simply call it Maltesey?

The reasoning: it is to a Maltese cross what a Potenty line is to a cross Potent...

Any input is greatly appreciated.

[Chris Green]

Nordic heraldry has several modern lines and yours is as good as any of them.

My personal preference would be to call it thorny as your intention was to suggest acacia thorns, though perhaps indented thorny would be a more accurate description. I think for an English blazon there is no reason to use a French term, though the Canadian Heraldic Authority would no doubt do so for their French blazon. I know that English blazon is littered with French terms, but they date from the time when heralds' lingua franca was indeed French (be thankful they didn't use Latin or classical Greek!).

There is indeed a resemblence to the top of a Maltese Cross, but that was not your intention, so perhaps the term maltesey should be reserved for a line composed of the top halves of Maltese crosses.

[JMcMillan]

As the person to blame for the term épiné (back in 2006, I wrote on the AHS forum, "which I would suggest naming épiné, assuming [incorrectly] that that's French for thorny") I too have come to prefer plain English. In this case, however, I fear that the plain English "thorny" will be subject to misunderstanding and lead to an artist drawing a partition line looking like the edge of a rose stalk or something like that.

It turns out that the French word for "thorny" is actually épinéux/épinéuse, but this would actually be worse for blazoning purposes than épiné, since it is not only foreign and unfamiliar but just as subject to misinterpretation as plain English "thorny." In a sense, being incorrect French is an advantage of épiné: it doesn't already have a meaning other than as a description of Mekerios's partition line. The same seems to be true of érablé, beloved of the CHA; is this an actual French word meaning maple-leafy? I don't think so. If anything, on the model of sapiné, it would describe an area of land "covered with maple trees," but in fact seems to exist only in heraldic-speak.

Perhaps a better way of rendering all these terms in English would be something like "per fess of maple leaves," "per fess of fir trees," "per fess of acacia thorns," etc. But if we're going to keep saying érablé, sapiné, sapinagé, objecting to épiné on the grounds that it's not correct French seems like pots and kettles.

Anyway, when did "not correct French" become a compelling objection to the use of a term in English blazonry? I mean, humetté meaning "cut off"? Ancrée to mean "with arms shaped like the flukes of an anchor" rather than what it really means, which is "anchored"? Bretessé, which derives from bretesse, in English "brattice," a type of wooden field fortification used in medieval siege warfare, to describe an embattled ordinary on which the merlons align with each other? The list is practically endless. If we're only going to use correct French in English blazonry, there's a lot of expurgation to be done.