{"id":30270,"date":"2013-07-25T15:46:01","date_gmt":"2013-07-25T15:46:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alternativejonestown.com\/?page_id=30270"},"modified":"2026-02-27T16:53:13","modified_gmt":"2026-02-28T00:53:13","slug":"jtslang","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=30270","title":{"rendered":"“Jonestown” As Slang"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just as “drinking the Kool-Aid”<\/a> has taken firm root within American slang, so the word “Jonestown” itself has acquired up new meanings and spawned new phrases. <\/p>\n

The Urban Dictionary<\/a> offers four definitions of “Jonestown” – including two with a lower case “j” – but only two have direct reference to the Peoples Temple community in Guyana. (Warning: The first of the definitions at this site is sexually explicit.) <\/p>\n

One online dictionary<\/a> defined the term “Jonestown defense” as a “defense against a corporate takeover in the form of a poison pill so strong that it threatens the survivability of the target company.” <\/p>\n

In addition, the use of “Jonestown” as a verb has entered the lexicon of the sports world, even if a precise meaning is unclear. “Greg would seal the game with an arching run and a try to Jonestown to finish off the scoring 4-3,” one blogger<\/a> wrote in a review of a competitive touch football league in Singapore. “Without Iverson trying to Jonestown they lose about, say, 15% of the craziness,” a commentator<\/a> on the National Basketball Association wrote. When one poster on SportsInferno, a Detroit area sports blog, wrote that his office “must want to get some production out of me today,”  a respondent replied “or they’re trying to Jonestown your ass.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just as “drinking the Kool-Aid” has taken firm root within American slang, so the word “Jonestown” itself has acquired up new meanings and spawned new phrases. The Urban Dictionary offers four definitions of “Jonestown” – including two with a lower case “j” – but only two have direct reference to the Peoples Temple community in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"parent":30363,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-30270","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30270"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":134443,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30270\/revisions\/134443"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}