kook = K = kremvax

Kool Aid, to drink the

[from a kid's sugar-enriched drink in fruity flavors] When someone who should know better succumbs to marketing influences and actually begins to believe the propaganda being dished out by a vendor. Usually the decortication process is slow and almost unnoticeable until one day the victim emerges as a True Believer and begins spreading the faith himself. The term originates in the suicide of 914 followers of Jim Jones's People's Temple cult in Guyana in 1978. What they actually drank was cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid, a cheap knockoff rather than Kool-Aid itself. There is a FAQ on this topic.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, this entry manually entered by rootbeer277.