Thank you for your thoughtful commentary on the use of the phrase "drank the Kool-Aid" in a recent Annals News & Perspective story. We certainly did not mean to diminish or make light of the suffering and death of so many people at Jonestown 33 years ago. We do make a distinction between September 11, 2001, references, a fresh wound in our collective memory, and the Kool-Aid phrase, which has crept into the lexicon during the past 3 decades, whether born of the Jonestown massacre or a slightly different shade of meaning drawn from Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. We would contend that "drink the Kool-Aid" has slipped its etymologic moorings and simply means what it means: to buy into an ideology wholeheartedly and without reservation, which may have a positive or negative connotation, depending on the context. Examples in our language abound, eg, "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" or "basket case," the latter British World War I slang for quadruple amputee war wounded.
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