Vexillology is a fancy word for Flag Design. It has become, in the age of Internet Rhetoric, a subculture with a very specific aesthetic. I could explain, or I could let this famous old video do it:

I enjoy this because I have long held the “State Seal on blue” design with aristocratic disdain. Also because it roasts California and praises Texas. It envisions a set of aesthetic principles on Flag Design, and grades the states for their offerings:

1. Keep it Simple, something a child could draw
2. Make it Distinct at a Distance. No Tiny Details.
3. Three Colors or Fewer
4. Symbols, colors, or designs should mean something
5. No Words, and especially not the Name of the place

However, that is not the only take on this topic. Since any idea sufficiently propagated creates the seeds of its own negation, there is currently an anti-vexillogical riot going on. This fellow leads the charge:

This is long, and the guy is the anti-CCPGrey: zero snark, just a thorough debunking of the entire heuristic of the previous video, point-by-point.

1. Why does a child need to be able to draw it?
2. Tiny details enrich the value of a flag, they make it distinct and unique. People do not typically mistake their flag for another, despite many flags being similar.
3. Why Three? Why does everything have to look like a tricolor? Why are we being uptight about this?
4. You should know what the things mean before you criticize them. In fact, you should know the origin of the flag before you presume to critique it.
5. Again, says who? Flags have typically had words on them for as long as flags have existed, as have the coats of arms that flags descended from. Stop insisting that everything look like IKEA furniture.

Thus, even though I enjoyed the CCPGrey video, I admit that Premodernist argued his points well and persuasively. I came away thoroughly convinced.

However.

He also irritated me, because he violated his own rule in his discussion of the flag of Maryland. So much so that I did something I never do, which is comment on a YouTube video.

I would have liked it if, given your discussion of the importance of knowing a flag’s history prior to making pronouncements about it, you had mentioned the history of Maryland’s flag before you proceeded to trash it on knee-jerk aesthetic grounds (exactly as CCP Grey did with the bluebells).

Maryland did not adopt its state flag to be quirky and win le epic internet points. Maryland’s flag is the coat of arms of the Calvert Family, who ruled Maryland as a kind of Earldom under the British Crown (the actual title was Lord Proprietor, similar to the Penns in Pennsylvania). Which is to say, Maryland’s flag is an Actual Coat of Arms, granted by a monarch to a nobleman, rather than something hacked out by a collection of elected lawyers to LARP as a coat of arms. The great seal of the state has used the Calvert coat of arms since at least 1854.

That’s before you get into the way that Marylanders who fought on different sides of the Civil War embraced different parts of it, with Unionist Marylanders going with the yellow-and-black “palisade” and Secessionist Marylanders going with the red-and-white cross, and how the adoption of the coat of arms as a state flag in 1904 was a gesture of reconciliation.

{Edit: Last snarky line removed. I did think this video was good overall and you made very good points throughout.}

Yes, I nerded all over him. For the record, I don’t especially like CCPGrey’s take on the Maryland flag, which falls under the “le quirky epic chungus” ironic so-ugly-its-awesome appreciation. Maryland’s flag might not be sedate, but that hardly makes it ugly. It has bright colors, simple shapes, and a unique quartering design. It stands out, in a good way, and I like it.

AND it’s an ACTUAL coat of arms, belonging to an ACTUAL aristocratic family, who ACTUALLY came and lived in the colony they ruled at least some of the time. That makes them the closest thing to royalty that America has ever had. So stick that in your pipe and smoke it, William Penn, you Quaker dork.

So yes, it’s kind of cool to know that the origin of the Bluebell Flags was as battle flags carried by the Union Army during the Civil War, that doesn’t make them any less boring. If the citizens of those states want to keep them, however, out of a sense of tradition, they should do so, and not bow to the fashion trends of the kind of CalArts-loving nerds who think the Bauhaus movement was a religion rather than an idea. And if you want your name on your flag? Go nuts. Hell, put it all over the place just to annoy people I would respect that.

Also, Virgina’s flag is cool. It has “Sic Semper Tyrannis” (Thus always to Tyrants) on it. John Wilkes Booth shouted that after killing Lincoln. History, you guys!