Kool-Aid
[from a kid's sugar-enriched drink in fruity flavors] When someone who
should know better succumbs to marketing influences and actually begins to
believe the propaganda being dished out by a vendor, they are said to have
drunk the Kool-Aid. Usually the decortication process is slow and almost
unnoticeable until one day the victim emerges as a True Believer and begins
spreading the faith himself. The term originates in the suicide of 914
followers of Jim Jones's People's Temple cult in Guyana in 1978 (there are
also resonances with Ken Kesey's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests from the
1960s). What the Jonestown victims actually drank was cyanide-laced
Flavor-Aid, a cheap knockoff, rather than Kool-Aid itself. There is a FAQ
on this topic.
This has live variants. When a suit is blithering on about their latest
technology and how it will save the world, that's ?pouring Kool-Aid?. When
the suit does not violate the laws of physics, doesn't make impossible
claims, and in fact says something reasonable and believable, that's
pouring good Kool-Aid, usually used in the sentence ?He pours good
Kool-Aid, doesn't he?? This connotes that the speaker might be about to
drink same.
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