The damage to the Kool-Aid (Kool-Ade?) folks, due to the bad-imaging, must be immense. Today, the very phrase “Kool-Aid” is nigh synonymous with anything deceptively toxic – often used metaphorically to refer to a noxious belief or ideology. So, yeah, I think the Kool-Aid folks must have really cared about what has happened to their brand name.
Jonestown wasn’t the only influence. There was also Ken Kesey and Tom Wolfe with their LSD Kool-Aid parties and Wolfe’s book on the subject The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
> If we’re going to nitpick, note that the “comet cult” was Heaven’s Gate.
Incidentally, the Heaven’s Gate cult trademarked the use of the Hale-Bopp Comet as a refuge for a suicide cult. If you want to create a cult that will commit mass suicide so that you can all be transported to a spaceship behind a comet, you have to use a different comet than Hale-Bopp. The Heaven’s Gate people have exclusive rights to that comet.
How would they enforce it? They committed suicide.
Anyway I doubt that they can exercise exclusive rights in the concept of … What is it? … Spiritual refuge in a comet. In fact, I’m almost certain they can’t stop another commit-suicide-and-ride-Hale-Bopp cult from operating. It’s simply not a trademark use.
I think what hurt kool-aid even more were all of the living room walls busted down by that rogue pitcher of kool-aid (and he was even smiling that whole time, like he didn’t even care about the damage).
I’ve lived in Georgia for 20 years, and I’ve never, ever heard the phrase “what kind if coke do you want” uttered. Maybe if someone didn’t know if you preferred diet, but probably not even then.
What I do hear all the time is “Can I get you a Coke or something?”
Most of us aren’t disputing that we use Coke as a generic term in the way I listed above. People tend to take it a little farther, and believe that we use the term “Coke” to refer to other, specific drinks.
I heard it growing up, but I wonder if it’s generational thing. My grandparents, who would be 90ish if they were still alive, used “soda water” as the generic term, while my parents used Coke as a catch-all for all sodas. I did it myself growing up, though I’ve largely stopped.
The people I know that use coke for items other than Coca-Cola or it’s knockoffs don’t quite use it as a generic term like soda or pop. They use it specifically for the brown and/or cola variety. In other words, Pepsi is a coke, but Sprite is not.
The San Francisco Chronicle, for one, reported it as being “purple Kool-Aid” at the time. Front page from Nov. 21, 1978.
Doesn’t mean that’s necessarily correct, but they were unlikely to have been the only source saying Kool-Aid.
