Thursday, December 11th — The Kool-Aid

Today I Learned…

…where the phrase “drink the Kool-Aid” comes from.  It commonly refers to the Jonestown tragedy (which I also just learned about recently), where cult leader Jim Jones convinced almost a thousand people to commit mass suicide by drinking Kool-Aid (or Flavor-Aid, or something like that) that had been laced with cyanide.

Makes sense, huh?  It also lends a much more sinister connotation to that particular idiom, which I always thought was supposed to be silly — something along the lines of being invited into a group with a ritual sharing of tropical-flavored sugar water.