i saw a show on the history channel that said the jim jones followers at jonestown did not kill themselves by drinking grape koolaid as is commonly beleived…it was grape flavor aid…is this true?
Yes, it was Flavor-Aid, not Kool-Aid. Even suicidal comet cults need to watch their budgets.
Seriously, out of all the potential questions arising from this particular bit of history, the type of powdered drink mix they used is what’s troubling you?
Well, you know why there’s never been any Jim Jones jokes, don’t you?
The punchlines are too long!
So I guess the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” should be changed to “drinking the Flavor-Aid”?
why does everyone think it was koolaid, to the extent ‘drinking the koolaid’ has become part of the lexicon
Same reason everyone in the south calls all carbonated beverages coke. The specific name for a popular item often becomes shorthand for the entire group. All building blocks are called legos, all facial tissues are kleenex (kleenices?), and all photocopiers used to be called Xeroxes. Everyone drinks kool-aid, some people just buy flavor-aid brand kool-aid.
This is called genericization, and these days companies will try very hard to prevent it from happening to their products.
Yes it is, and they can try and even be successful in legal and marketing arenas but for everyday conversation, no one really cares about company trademarks.
Really? When you want a tissue, you think of Kleenex. When you want to photocopy something, you want a Xerox. That’s a BAD thing for Kleenex or Xerox? I would think that’s the best thing that could possibly happen to a product.
You can’t register it as a trademark if it’s generic. I can market my own brand of yo-yos as yo-yos without fear of legal reprisal. I can’t market my own brand of lego blocks as legos.
We’ve done this before. The fact is that we don’t know what it was. There was footage at the time showing both Kool-Aid and Flavor-Aid in the compound. Official reports were vague. It may well have been Kool-Aid, we just don;t know for sure.
Even taking Blake’s message to heart, Kool-Aid is catchier and less clunky to say :p. Either way, I think if someone says “drinking the Kool-Aid” it’s kind of dodgy to correct them, I think most people who know the Flavor-Aid factoid still use the Kool-Aid construction. Such is the way of idioms.
Right, if Kleenex lost their trademark due to general use, they’d have to come up with another name for Kleenex*, which would be just as unknown as the other 100 billion companies who started using the word Kleenex. Sure they could market it as “from the original Kleenex creators!” But the damage would be done.
- Well, not be FORCED to, it’s just everybody else would be using it, so business-wise it’d probably make sense to come up with a new brand name.
Very bad! Case in point: Aspirin. Bayer lost the trademark to the name Aspirin so now any pain reliever with that same chemical compound can call itself aspirin thereby diluting Bayer’s share of the market. See the wikipedia entry for aspiri for more info.
Just thought of Jello too. We always refer to that geletan concoction as Jello even if it is made by another company. Jello makes no money when someone else sells a similar product.
And Vaseline…And Band Aid…but you get the idea.
Getting back to the OP. No, it isn’t true. Or at least we can’t say that it is true All the evidence suggests that it was Kool Aid, although the evidence is equivocal, and none of it suggests that it was Flavor Aid, though it’s not impossible that it was.
Previous thread..
If you think of every photocopier as a Xerox, then you’d probably be just as happy purchasing a Ricoh or a Canon. This costs Xerox sales.
When I was a kid growing up in Alabama (70s) I remember Coke being used as a generic term for carbonated soft drinks but I can’t remember hearing it much or at all since then. I don’t think it’s really used nearly as often now.
Here in GA it is. When I worked in fast food and retail, I was asked what kind of cokes we sell, and it was a general catch all for coke, pepsi, and generic soda products.
I’ve been aware of this since I read the first news stories at the time. It bothered me from the first that people were calling it “Kool Aid”, but that’s the brand everyone’s familiar with, so that’s what got repeated. Corrections don’t go very far. In fact, even on this very Board, those who repeatedly pointed out the error were dismissed as pedants.
Did you read the link above? As far as anyone can tell it *was *Kool Aid. Correcting someone for saying so is not just being pedantic, it’s factually incorrect.