I made the poll about spoilers. Probably could have added a lot more choices.
Nobody ever talked about spoilers until the 90s and that whole Bruce Willis thing. At least, no adult would admit to caring much if the surprise was revealed. But now it’s endlessly debated. Funny thing is, once you’ve either been spoiled, or seen the movie/ read the book, you inevitably move on. You joined the in-crowd, and it’s not really a big deal. So to me, it’s just a part of life. Sometimes you get spoiled, sometimes you don’t, but don’t be a baby about it okay?
Maybe that’s when the word “spoilers” started being used in that context, but I’m sure people were talking about “spoiling the surprise” or “spoiling the ending” of movies and books long before that.
We’ve had a whole thread recently discussing how people feel about spoilers and why, so we probably don’t need to hash it out here.
To me, the only spoilers that should never be revealed are twists or surprise ending.
I was at the video store looking for a Friday night movie, and a lady suggested The Usual Suspects. “You’ll never guess the surprise ending,” she said while her husband shushed her. “But I didn’t tell him what it was,” she replied to him. That spoiled the ending for me. A couple of years later, I ran into them while she was thinking about getting The Sixth Sense. “Bruce Willis is a ghost,” I told her. She started to get angry with me when her husband told her that payback was fair.
Oh I’m well aware twists, surprises, shocks, reveals, bombshells, jolts and similar eureka moments have been around for a long time. Whining about spoilers is more recent, in a media-drenched world, where spoiler and spoilee are often strangers, and more likely to encounter each other.
My school was split – freshmen and most sophomores at the new building, a hundred or so sophomores and the juniors and seniors at the old building (the latter was really two buildings – the old one and the really old one). The oldest and newest buildings had dedicated auditoriums but I don’t remember there being one at the middle one.
We had an introduction to tennis in 9th-grade PE, but we went to a nearby public park for that.
I had to ride a school bus up until the middle of seventh grade, when we moved to the big city. After that I walked. I still don’t ride buses unless I have no other options.
We had a rifle range in the basement of the middle building, used by the school rifle team for practice. Army JROTC was still mandatory for boys when I finished high school (either two years of ROTC or three years of marching band), and the rifles and ammo were – and still are – kept locked up in the ROTC office.
I’ve always pronounced the cow name as three syllables, but maybe I’m promising it wrong.
Also, i didn’t vote for any of the options for first syllable, but I’m not sure how to spell what i say. It’s not like the word “her”, but like the first syllable of “herring”.
