We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
According to Zimmer (2014) and McCool (2015) the term “spoiler” started out in the 1970s. McCool reports that in 1971 Doug Kenney, one of the founders of the National Lampoon, had a feature called “Spoilers” in which he revealed the ending of such films as The Godfather, Citizen Kane and Psycho. McCool also reports the use of “spoiler warning” in a column in the sci-fi magazine Destinies. As for the actual term “spoiler alert,” both sources agree that it first occurred in 1982, in a Usenet post (on Usenet, see Chapter 1), apparently in the context of a discussion of The Wrath of Kahn (a Star Trek movie).
A “spoiler alert” is essentially a courtesy warning to the reader/viewer/hearer that one is about to reveal something about a show, book, game, etc., that is a significant plot point (for example, who wins the game). Thus if one wants to avoid having the plot spoiled, one should stop reading/watching, etc. The interest in spoiler alerts comes from the fact this is very much a contemporary phenomenon and that jokes and memes have been using the term. If one searches for “spoiler alert” on the internet, one will find that numerous articles have the phrase “spoiler alert” in the title as a clever way of conveying the point of the article. For example, the title of Viega and Thompson (2012) is “Ten Years On, How Are We Doing? (Spoiler Alert: We Have No Clue)”. I will provide an extended example by analyzing a short 2015 comedy video by Key and Peele titled “Spoiler alert” which makes fun of the topic.
As we can see from the Google n-gram, in Figure 9.1, the earliest mention of the term begins in the 1990s, but the term does not really “take off” until the 2000s. So we can safely say that the spoiler alert is a practice (I hesitate to call it a genre) that is truly exclusive to the digital world. Now it is obvious that “spoilers” have always existed, at least potentially. It is easy to image someone saying, “Dante makes it out of hell and into heaven” to a reader in AD 1321 or a reader saying, “Aeneas makes it to Rome” to a would-be reader of the Aeneid in 18BC.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
