kool-aid

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. What they 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.