Hacker News Reader

Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

Wrong usage of the term

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_the_Kool-Aid

>"Drinking the Kool-Aid" is an expression used to refer to a person who believes in a possibly doomed or dangerous idea because of perceived potential high rewards. The phrase often carries a negative connotation. It can also be used ironically or humorously to refer to accepting an idea or changing a preference due to popularity, peer pressure, or persuasion. In recent years it has evolved further to mean extreme dedication to a cause or purpose, so extreme that one would "drink the Kool-Aid" and die for the cause.

View on HN

> a possibly doomed or dangerous idea because of perceived potential high rewards.

IMAO the right term. If you think Linux development is cool and awesome then doing that on a Windows machine is about the worst choice I can think of. The operating system that invades your privacy so aggressively that you become the product after you have bought a license for a couple of hundreds of dollars.. With all the awesome free Linux distro's available it keeps stunning me that people are willing to pay for an OS that is being made to invade and milk your life..

I’m looking for some honest answers.

A lot of people talk about one of the biggest downsides of Windows 10 being lack of privacy. What specific data are you concerned about and how does that manifest itself in a practical sense.

I know there are some that are against purely on principle but this question is really for those where that isn’t the case. I just want to better understand.

I've also always wondered this and never got an answer

> "The phrase originates from events in Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978, in which over 900 members of the Peoples Temple movement died. The movement's leader [...] Jones proposed "revolutionary suicide" by way of ingesting a powdered drink mix lethally laced with cyanide and other drugs which had been prepared by his aides."

TIL. I always thought the expression somehow referred to the drink itself, or perhaps its brand.

It's easy to see how it got to mean "follow an idea of perceived potential high rewards", especially since the phrase itself sounds (vaguely) positive. Since people started using literally meaning figuratively, such changes no longer surprise me.

https://www.koolaid.com/ shows children's products that is a fun mixture of many items. There are also links that share recipes using these terms like https://www.food.com/recipe/absolutely-perfect-kool-aid-3338...

Also as History would have it, this was first coined perhaps in Nebraska, for commercial purpose as put in the article https://history.nebraska.gov/publications/kool-aid.

I think there are many such terms in English that has polar opposite meanings/cannotations/usages. "Swasthik" is supposedly a very pious symbol for the Hindus. Incidentally, the Nazis used a similar or closely resembling symbol but had never called it Swastik/Swastika. And yet the cunning colonial British popularized that as Swastik and the world continues to refer to it so instead of calling it merely Nazi symbol.

Sorry, you think the (colonial) British spread the usage of the term 'Swastika' to defame Hindu culture? You are aware that the Nazis started using the swastika as part of their occultist ideology after 150 years of British colonialism in the Indian subcontinent?

Just take the L for misusing an American idiom. There's nothing wrong with not knowing the precise meaning of particular idioms in a language that is not your own. 'Drinking the Kool-Aid' is not relevant to our cultural context and using it incorrectly is hardly relevant to the content of your article. Trying to draw spurious comparisons with foreign interpretations of Sanskrit words is not really relevant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com