Blason
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Blason originally comes from a heraldic term in French heraldry and means either the codified description of a coat of arms or the coat of arms itself. The terms "blason", "blasonner", "blasonneur" were used in 16th c. French literature by poets who, following Clement Marot in 1536, practised a genre of poems that praised a woman by singling out different parts of her body and finding appropriate metaphors to compare them with. It is still being used with that meaning in literature and especially in poetry. One famous example of such a poem, ironically rejecting each proposed stock metaphor, is William Shakespeare's Sonnet CXXX:
- 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.
Blason populaire is a phrase in which one culture or ethnic group increases its own self-esteem by belittling others eg. Samuel Johnson's description that "The noblest prospect which a Scotsman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England!"
The term originated from Auguste Canel's travelogue Blason Populaire de la Normandie (1859), in which people from Normandy boasted about themselves while sneering at other regions.
