hermitian symmetric spaces have played a distinguished role in the history of representation theory and they continue to be a source of beautiful and often surprising results. in this talk, i will use a natural generalization of young diagrams for hermitian symmetric spaces to give a concrete and uniform approach to a wide variety of interconnected topics including non-compact roots and canonical reduced expressions, abelian ideals in a borel subalgebra, rational smoothness of schubert varieties in co-minuscule flag varieties, equivalences of categories of highest weight modules, bgg resolutions, and syzygies of determinantal ideals.