Then I suggest you keep talking to dog droppings, as that is clearly where your talent lies.
Lordy, lordy, I thought this thread had peacefully passed away. What I find funniest, upon review, is that I didn’t actually say that Gandalf lived; MsWhatsit gave it away when she over-examined my example of a non-spoiler. Oh the irony…
Just curious, but what are these threads with LOTR spoilers in them? I spend a lot of time in Cafe Society, and I read all the Tolkien threads, and I don’t think I’ve seen any. The only one specifically mentioned in this thread was “Frodo’s End,” which isn’t even remotely a spoiler because it doesn’t mention anythng about what Frodo’s “end” is. Is it refering to the part where Sauron cracks open Frodo’s head like an egg and eats his brains? Or the part where Frodo returns to the Shire, marries Sam, and they settle down for a long an happy life together. Or maybe it’s one of those pervy hobbit fanciers fixating on Elijah Wood’s ass. Even if it were more explicit than that, it’s still not a spoiler because it doesn’t have anything to do with the main story, and is only Tolkien tying up some loose ends at the end of the book.
And, I’d like to point out that Gandalf is “dead” for a grand total of about 220 pages, from about 3/4 into Fellowship until about a quarter into The Two Towers. This is out of one book measuring, depending on your edition and excluding the appendicies, some 1400 pages (remember, The Lord of the Rings is only a trilogy because the publisher didn’t want to put out one book that large: it was written as, and has the structure of, a single book). So we’re talking about a minor event that happens early in the novel and is resolved shortly thereafter. This is NOT a spoiler.
Anyway, to sum up, yes, people shouldn’t put spoilers in thread titles, even for books that are more than half a century old. On the other hand, since no one seems to actually be doing this, MsWhatsit’s bellyaching seems to be pretty much pointless.