Nitpick: I don’t think it was the Pit to start with – it’s been all over the internet. Multiple cases of evolution, possibly. I remember seeing it on Usenet in the mid-90s which is when I hit college.
…
I just checked the Jargon File entry, and it credits Scott Adams for popularizing it but traces it to a 1989 entry in a .sig block, so who knows who started it off.
Just to be crystal clear, in the quoted passage, Really Not All That Bright should read Madpansy64. Like this:
Really Not All That Bright asked what the hell I was babbling about, not doing the babbling himself.
Curriculums is perfectly correct. We’re speaking English, not Latin.
I’d never heard of the phrase ‘Revenge of the Cradle’, and neither had my boyfriend. We’ve both Quebecers, born and raised, with a full year of Quebec history in high school.
The best was on America’s Next Top Model, when one of the models declared that elephants were in the dinosaur family.
For once.
I have, it’s quite well known (under the term “revanche des berceaux” at least). I’m no expert on the subject, but if tdn asks questions I can try answering them (and so can matt_mcl and other posters, I guess).
Hypnagogic Jerk (love the new name), can you start by telling us, in short essay format, what the hell the Revenge of the Cradle is/was? (I know I can look it up on Wiki, but I think that’s the question most people are asking when they see your post, so we might as well get it answered here.)
Okay. In general terms, what “revenge of the cradle” refers to is a situation where two ethnic groups exist in the same country, and one of them (usually the minority group) has a much larger natural growth rate, leading to changes in the demographics of the country. In other words, they may be a minority (due to having been invaded or something else), but they’re getting their revenge by making children.
Consider the specific case of Canada, which is what tdn was asking about. In 1840 francophones were the majority in Canada, but most immigrants were coming from the British Isles, such that in the next few years the situation was reversed. But no problem: French-Canadians were mostly Catholic, and the power of the Church was in an upward swing at the time, so the Church leaders started to encourage their flock to make babies. If you look at French-Canadian families from the end of the 19[sup]th[/sup] and beginning of the 20[sup]th[/sup] century you’ll see that 10 children or more was the norm. I think my maternal grandmother had 22 siblings and half-siblings. Women were taught to not refuse their husband’s advances, and they were questioned by their priest if it had been some time since they were last pregnant. I guess you could think of the Irish family in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, if you want an image. The era of the large families lasted until around World War II (dates and numbers are approximative, as I said I’m not an expert in the subject). The grandmother I mentioned earlier married after the war and only had four children.
This had the effect that even at a time where, by policy of the federal government, pretty much all immigration to Canada was from Britain or from Germanic countries, with maybe around 3% of French-speakers, the proportion of francophones in Canada still remained high, and remained the majority in Quebec.
Now tdn’s been first asking about the question in [post=9276979]this post[/post]. To answer his interrogations, I’m quite sure that I’ve heard about it in school, in a neutral way, as it’s usually done with history. I don’t think I’ve ever been told that this episode of our history was “good” or “bad”, it just happened, and while it had the effect of maintaining the demographic power of francophones in Canada (which I would consider as good), it symbolises the power the Church once had upon us, and that’s something I’m happy to know has drastically changed. Also, I’m not convinced there was any master plan to it, and if there was, I guess it wasn’t to have “Catholics […] eventually outbreed non-Catholics”, but to “preserve the virtuous French-Canadian race”, so to speak.
This is what I know about the Revenge of the Cradle.
A few years ago I worked at a gas station.
We had a bathroom with a lock on the inside of the door. Sometimes people would find it was locked and ask for a key, so they put up a little sign that said “If locked, the bathroom is occupied” or something similar.
So, I’m at the cash register when someone walks up, and we have this conversation:
Him: “Can I have the bathroom key?”
Me: “There’s no key, if it’s locked then there’s someone in there.”
[pause]
Him: “How does it know?”
[He’s not asking what I think he’s asking, right? Did I miss something?]
Me: “How does… what… know… what?”
Him: “How does the bathroom know that someone is in there?”
[I’m too startled and confused to laugh at him]
Me: When someone goes in there they lock the door behind them.
[pause… look of realization]
Him: Ohhhhhh.
That’s actually not the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen, but it’s the one most easily translated to text.
Well, it was in my Histoire du Québec et du Canada textbook when I took it in Sec IV in 1995-1996.
Huh. Well, I know we all took the same test, so maybe I learned it and forgot. Still, not the kind of thing anyone should be mocked for not knowing!
I don’t think I’ve seen anything in this thread that suggests anyone should be mocked for not knowing about it. After a quick re-glance it looks like the hijack was started when tdn mused that it was odd that some hisotrical events have more of a presence than others, comparing the Halifax explosion to the Revenge of the Cradle.
Argh! In the “department of redundancy department” context, I just heard a guy doing a voiceover on a National Geographic documentary refer to “minus 10 degrees below zero.” Not earth-shatteringly stupid, but certainly aggravating.
This one boggled my mind. Fromhere :
And these people live long enough to BREED!
Thanks for the explanation, HJ. That sounds like what some Californians are now saying about the imminent Mexican “takeover” of our state, which is creepy mostly because it’s posited as a Bad Thing. Me, I think those folks could stand a history lesson or two (where do they think California comes from?), but that’s neither here nor there, although I suppose it qualifies as an incredibly stupid thing I’ve heard others say.
You simply misinterpreted him. He meant 10 degrees above zero, of course. What’s -(-10)? 
Maybe not earth-shatteringly stupid on, oh, Fox News, but more than aggravating on a show intended for education, rather than simple entertainment. [Unless the person was speaking ad lib on site; then the error just demonstrates how cold -10 degrees is].
My entry:
Do you people really believe people descended from monkeys?
Well, to continue this hijack for a bit, it can be quite frustrating for people to suddenly realise that even though they’ve lived in the same place all their life, they suddenly can’t communicate with their neighbours. I support the idea that immigrants to the US should learn enough English to sustain a conversation. (Yes, even though many parts of the US used to be part of Mexico and Spanish-speaking, and even though all of it used to be populated exclusively by natives earlier than that.) But unlike these Californians you’re talking about, I’m not worried about it. The English language has a strong enough attraction potential to ensure that people will learn it and use it.
That’s like saying “6AM in the morning” which I hear constantly. It semi-annoys me, but what are ya gonna do?
My ex once was reading a book discussing the events of World War I:
Her: It says here that the French used 75mm artillery.
Me: Yeah, that’s right.
Her: That doesn’t make any sense. How could those tiny little guns hurt anything?
OK, let’s put this hijack to bed. Bilingualism is a completely different animal in California compared to Quebec. The concept that our state is teeming with Mexicans who refuse to learn English is simply blatantly wrong, and it is absurd on its face because of all of the obvious benefits that come with learning English and all of the obvious hardships that come with not learning English in that situation. I don’t blame you one bit for supporting that idea, because you come from an environment where (AIUI) nobody really has to learn English to have a rich, fulfilling life if they already speak French. People who have lived in California for a long time should know better, though, and the only reason they would attribute the lack of English language skills suffered by some immigrants (a tiny minority of them, IME) to malice or arrogance is sheer unbridled stupidity.
Well, that explains a lot, doesn’t it?
Remember in school (I don’t know if they do this anymore) where kids were put on certain tracks related to their intelligence*? I was in algebra, and I had a friend who was, let’s just say, not taking algebra.
I was trying to talk to her about negative numbers, and she could just not wrap her head around the concept. She was arguing with me about if you have 2 crayons, you cannot take away 3, since there are only two to begin with.
When we arrived at school, she marched off the school bus, stomped up to her math teacher, and vented about her crazy friend who talked about taking 3 crayons away from 2 crayons and would he please set me straight? As he explained to her that I was talking about negative numbers I managed to slip away.
*Nowadays, some of the kids at my children’s school are taking AP English, some are taking Honors English, and some are taking English II, but I think that’s just a matter of what the teacher expects from them, not the level of the material taught. I think kids naturally progress from math to algebra to geometry to trig to calculus. I don’t think (I could be wrong) that some kids are sidetracked into “dumber” math anymore.