4

Every Baby Wore A Dress (For Poop Reasons)

We've mentioned before that the current craze of gender-specific baby stuff is actually a recent phenomenon, and that for much of history both genders wore feminine, flowing clothes as babies. After all, babies are basically highly efficient human-waste factories, and flowing garments are easier to wrangle when you're trying to clean up said waste in an era before zippers and Velcro. But sometimes this skirts-for-everyone thing went past mere convenience and way into "my parents must have really wished I was a girl" territory. Here, for example, is the very male 18th-century French king Louis XV:

Via Wikipedia

And here's young Ernest Hemingway, whose mother admittedly went a little overboard:

Via nobelprize.org

On the one hand, the continued survival of male humans definitely seems to prove that putting little boys in feminine clothing isn't harmful to them, which is a good reason to stop calling down the wrath of God whenever a parent paints their son's nails or when a retail chain ditches its gender-specific toy labeling. On the other, why would you dress a kid of either gender like this?

Via Wikipedia
He's probably pooping, like, all over that, guys.

3

English-Speakers Have Always Been Terrible At Naming Kids

Even if you're not yet at the "get off my lawn" stage of human life, you probably agree that English-language names are getting weird. And it's true that "original" names are far more prevalent than they have been in the past, and that, around the country, thousands of preschool-aged Rykers and Maysons are unprepared for the nightmare of Starbucks cups and tedious phone-spellings that awaits them in adult life.

Hill Street Studios/Blend Images/Getty Images
"We can't wait to meet little Joffrey Ann."

But this is far from the first unhealthy trend in English-speaking baby-naming. At one point in 14th-century England, for example, a full third of the male population was named either William or John, and it was even common to give siblings the same goddamn name: One record has a family of three living sons all named John and two living daughters both named Margaret. And you thought it was bad that there are four Jaydens in your daughter's kickboxing class.

Around the time of the Puritans, things somehow got even weirder: To distinguish themselves from their not-religious-enough countrymen, and perhaps also because everyone still remembered being so goddamn sick of John, a new type of biblical name swarmed the child-naming market. And by "biblical name," I mean "opening a page of the Bible and naming the kid the first thing you saw."

Comstock/Stockbyte/Getty Images
"'And the Lord said unto Chad ...' -- DAMMIT."

That probably isn't an exaggeration, by the way: Recorded Puritan names include "Fear-not," "Give-Thanks," "Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith," and other names that appear to have come from parents rummaging desperately through the Good Book like they were searching a bag for the last non-yellow Starburst.

2

Toilet Training (Supposedly) Caused War Crimes

In the early 1940s, anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer had an idea. An idea about poop. Gorer explained that Japanese parents potty train their children earlier than parents in the West, and that this early poop-control made them murderously repressed, which explained Japanese soldiers' excessive brutality in World War II. In other words, parents, when you're excitedly giving your child a sticker for evacuating their bowels in the musical training toilet shaped like a race car, you might think the only damage being done is the painful, nagging reminder that you used to be cool. When in fact you could be creating a future violator of the Geneva Conventions, and your child will probably one day take a dump on the killing fields.

David De Lossy/Photodisc/Getty Images
Only the dead know the end of war (it's poop).

Unbelievably, people took Gorer seriously: He was hired as an analyst (heh) for the U.S. Office of War Information during World War II. Why? Well, his ideas were fertilized (heh) by Freudianism, which I'm starting to think was just an excuse for grown men to write about poop without all the other psychologists laughing at them. According to Freud's theories -- which people actually believed, you guys, I can't stress this enough -- toilet training a child too early could lead to lifelong damage, by "freezing" his or her personality at a stage of poop-obsession. As late as 1999, a German professor was arguing that East Germans had trouble accepting democracy after the fall of Communism because of the way they'd been toilet trained as infants, which I'm sure was the real reason, rather than, you know, being raised in a Communist state.

Photos.com/PHOTOS.com>>/Getty Images
Above: Lenin tries in vain to explain his ideas to a baffled, normally-toilet-trained audience.

1

Burial Clubs Encouraged So Much Murder

"Burial clubs" might sound like a badass pastime for really organized goths, but they were actually a form of life insurance popular in 19th-century Britain. By providing payouts after death, burial clubs allowed grieving families to afford funeral expenses after their child fell inside one of those fancy top hats and suffocated. I don't have time to check right now, but I assume that was the leading cause of child death in the 19th century.

Via Wikipedia
"Why don't we just all stop wearing these hats?"
"Go eat a dick, Reginald."

But then as now, the idea of instant postmortem profits did create the incentive to, well, murder people. The difference is that a person today who tries to take out six different life insurance policies on a family member will soon be dealing with, like, all the police. Back in the 1800s, however, poor and desperate parents could profit from the death of a child with almost no questions asked: The industry was too unregulated for anyone to get suspicious, and anyway, infants just dropped dead all the time back then. So one child at the time was found to be enrolled in no fewer than 19 burial clubs, and if babies were a bit smarter, it probably would have packed up all its stuff using its adorable baby hands and run far away.

Design Pics/Design Pics/Getty Images
"We never ask Frank about his past, but we have our suspicions. He's got that thousand-yard stare."

Technically, the punishment for infanticide was the death penalty, but as it was almost impossible to distinguish between child-murderers and grieving parents who were still haunted by recurring hat-related nightmares, actual guilty verdicts were rare. So, assuming that these people left at least some of their children alive, some of the people reading this probably had great-great-grandparents who murdered their children for cash and got away with it. Be sure to bring that up at your next family seance.

C. Coville has a terrible Twitter here and a just-as-terrible Tumblr here.

Premature babies used to be sideshow attractions, but things still aren't exactly easy for them. See why in We Can Let Babies Die: 6 Realities Of Neonatal Nursing. And learn why your baby is imbued with the moral compass of God in 5 Amazing Things You Didn't Know Babies Could Do.

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