Drink the Kool-Aid

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Pete from Elgin.

Elgin, Illinois.

How are you doing, Pete?

Doing good.

I’m calling about something that’s become a cliché, and it really bothers me for a couple of reasons,

And it’s drinking the Kool-Aid.

Oh, yeah.

And I assume that this is based on the event at Jonestown 30 years ago.

Yeah, Pete, how would you hear people use it in a sentence, for example?

Well, I hear it more often spoken than I see it read, but here’s a specimen for you.

This was from the Huffington Post.

A blogger wrote this.

I get a little touchy when callers and blog respondents assume that because I’m not yet ready to drink the Obama Kool-Aid, that I must be in the tank for Hillary.

So that’s an example of a way that it’s used, and it bothers me.

What’s the difficulty with it?

Well, first of all, this is not the main reason, but I think it was a tragic, horrible event.

It conjures up bad pictures in my mind.

People use it kind of whimsically.

Yeah, I think you’re exactly right.

You’re referring to the grisly mass suicide in Jonestown back in, what, 1978?

It’s been 30 years, and it was horrifying,

Where Reverend Jim Jones had everybody drink poison out of big vats of flavored Kool-Aid

Or some kind of flavored drink, right?

Right. Some people didn’t even do it voluntarily.

They did it at the point of a gun.

Children were forced to drink it.

It was really a terrible thing.

Right, horrifying.

So I hate to hear it used that way.

But that isn’t even my main objection.

When people use it, it relates very poorly to the actual event.

In this way, people mean that when a person drinks the Kool-Aid that they’ve more or less been hypnotized by a charismatic character

Or they’ve been inducted into a corrupt corporate culture or something like that.

But it seems more accurately that drinking the Kool-Aid actually occurs long after you’ve been converted into a particular religion.

It actually happens when you do something destructive or self-destructive, perhaps many years later.

Drinking the Kool-Aid is not like being hypnotized by a potion.

It’s actually doing something self-destructive.

You see the difference?

Right.

It actually occurs many, could occur, you know, if you follow somebody blindly for years and then do everything they say,

And then he tells you to do something and you do something crazy, that’s drinking the Kool-Aid.

You brought a lot of issues up here, Pete, but the difficulty is this.

Words change, and the meaning change, and the use changes, and they don’t stick to their roots.

I think there’s a worse example than Drink the Kool-Aid where we use it in trivial fashion now.

Nazi.

We use the word Nazi to describe somebody who cuts us off in traffic or a teacher who gives too much homework.

Right.

Or a grammar Nazi.

A grammar Nazi.

As English speakers, we trivialize words all the time.

We take them from very harsh circumstances.

We kind of downgrade them to something that’s a little simpler.

We did that with Watergate, the suffix gate.

We no longer use it to describe this, you know, big scandal that unseats a president.

We now use it to describe the fact that we can’t get the sandwich we want in the cafeteria any longer

Because they’re now using a different vendor.

It’s sandwich gate.

It’s just, you know, we trivialize stuff.

Just because you, say, go along with a candidate, you decide to vote for him.

That doesn’t mean that you’ve drunk any Kool-Aid yet.

But if you were persuaded to do something really crazy, like a suicide bomber, for example, that would be drinking the Kool-Aid.

Well, it could be drinking the Kool-Aid, but that’s not how people use it.

So it isn’t drinking the Kool-Aid.

That’s what bugs me when I hear it.

Yeah, I see what you’re saying.

I think the Kool-Aid is already being diluted, so to speak.

Seriously, I mean, I’ve got the Oxford English Dictionary up on my computer screen,

And it lists as a definition to support wholeheartedly.

I mean, that’s really pretty deluded, you know, and I’m sorry for the pun,

But I think it’s very useful that you’ve sort of, you know, caught us up short

And called attention to this because now that I think about it,

It is a pretty creepy expression.

Yeah, well, I hope I’ve raised some people’s consciousness about it.

Well, we’re definitely glad to have given you an airing, Pete.

Thank you.

All right.

Thank you so much for your thoughtful call.

Okay.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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