Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 November 10

= November 10 =

Kool Aid
Our page on "drinking the kool-aid" is just about the term and Jonestown. But surely at least a few people used the phrase earlier, in reference to the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests? Temerarius (talk) 15:59, 10 November 2018 (UTC)
 * [Courtesy links to The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Jonestown]. One would think it plausible, given the ten-year interval between the book's publication (and longer since the antics described therein) and the mass-poisoning event, but the only way to be sure would be to find uses of the term between the 1960s and 1978, which I'm sure others will be much more adept at than myself. Obviously, the intended meanings of any usages prior to 1978 will differ somewhat from most usages afterwards when the darker implication became a trope. {The poster formerly known as 87.81 230.195} 2.218.14.42 (talk) 16:30, 10 November 2018 (UTC)
 * And another courtesy link to Drinking the Kool-Aid. Alansplodge (talk) 15:24, 11 November 2018 (UTC)
 * I was a child before the hippie era and before Wolfe's book was written. Back then, talking about drinking Kool-Aid was completely innocuous. I do not recall any negative connotations emerging in common language after Wolfe's book was published. Certainly, the book was well known but did not impact general meanings of Kool-Aid. But the Jonestown mass suicide was a gut punch to hundreds of millions of people. I lived in San Francisco at that time and I could see an assembly point for People's Temple bus trips across the street from one of my apartments in 1973. They were very well known and somewhat influential. The Jonestown mass suicide seared that phrase about drinking the Kool-Aid into the popular consciousness, and the phrase still resonates over 40 years later. Cullen328  Let's discuss it  07:10, 11 November 2018 (UTC)