Mots Maudits #3.1: Spoilers

In December 2025, Netflix  released the long-awaited fifth and final season of Stranger Things. Fans had been waiting so long for the denouement that most of the main actors, who were playing high school students, were aged between 21 and 24 years old. 

For reasons known only to themselves (presumably to maintain the buzz around the series for longer) Netflix decided to stagger the release of the final season, with a first batch of episodes dropping on 26 November, a second on 26 December, and the finale on 1 January 2026.

In order to avoid the inevitable cliffhanger of the final episode, against my daughter’s better judgement, I decided to wait until all the episodes were available before starting the season. What I hadn’t accounted for was the burgeoning cottage industry of YouTube “reactors.”

These “reactors” go online almost immediately after a new episode comes out to post recaps and explainers. I discovered this at my cost; when googling the release date for the final episode drop, I was inadvertently exposed to a YouTube thumbnail that revealed a significant spoiler, one that I’m going to take care not to repeat here.

This did not just annoy me, it caused me to mull on why spoilers feel like such a uniquely bad breach of cultural etiquette. The conclusion I landed on is that a spoiler doesn’t merely provide new information, it changes how you perceive the structure of the film or series you are watching. You stop wondering “what happens?” and start thinking about “when/why will X happen?”

Another Social Media Tragedy of the Commons

What I also find grating is that spoilers just used to be bad manners, but now they’re a business model. You search for information about a show or a film and get hit by a reveal before you can even choose what to read. It steals your first encounter with a story, and it treats culture as a natural resource to be mined rather than a common good to be cherished, with little respect for the storytelling arc and suspense. Re-watches can be great, but they are elective; a spoiler forces you into “second-viewing mode” before you’ve had a first viewing.

Spoiler Anecdotes

A friend of mine once ‘spoiled’ Star Wars for a colleague by mentioning the famous family revelation. For people of a certain age, that no longer feels like a spoiler; it feels like cultural literacy. It’s almost like talking about the New Testament and tiptoeing around… you know … the ending… the thing that everyone knows. Except of course, not everyone knows.

On the back of my spoiled Stranger Things experience, I tried to be impeccably spoiler-free while re-watching a particularly twisty episode of Black Mirror with my wife, who hadn’t seen it. To my dismay, my puritanical observance of spoiler etiquette did not heighten her enjoyment; it made the first half of the episode feel slow and opaque. That’s the thing about spoiler etiquette: it protects one kind of pleasure (discovery), but not everyone prioritises that pleasure. Some people would rather have a small hint than sit in confusion. I was bathed in the books of Roald Dahl and Agatha Christie as a child, so as far as I am concerned the twist in the tale is the most enjoyable part, but each to their own.

The Etymology of the Spoiler

By this point, I was starting to think about how the word “spoiler” entered the French vernacular. I would posit that the growth of online streaming platforms and social media has facilitated this import. Increasingly we are watching the same content across borders and using cross-border social media to talk about it.

However, I do wonder if, given how recent this import is, the word has built-in moral colour in English that is not reflected in its French usage. The English verb “spoil” carries notions of harm and damage, so “spoiler” in English is intrinsically evaluative; it encodes the idea of ruining. Alternative neutral phrases exist (“to reveal plot details”), but “spoiler” is a loaded term: it implies a violation of an implicit norm. In French, “spoiler” (as a noun or a verb, interestingly) inevitably doesn’t have the same natural negative valence.

Interestingly, there is a common etymological root between the English “spoiler” and the French “spolier” (to steal by force or abuse of power). In English, spoiler (and the verb to spoil) finds its root in the Old French espoillier / espoille (“to strip, plunder; booty”), itself from the Latin spoliare (“to strip, despoil”). 

In French, the modern verb “spoiler” (“to reveal plot elements and ruin the surprise”) is not a mutation of the Old French “espoillier” or the modern French “spolier,” it is a relatively recent borrowing from English. So spoiler is both a 14^th-century loan word from French to English and a 21^st-century loan word from English to French. Linguists have a name for this phenomenon: a “round-trip” borrowing (sometimes described as a re-borrowing).

The meaning has shifted a long way during the round trip, but that semantic drift is part of the charm: it shows how a word can come home with a new job and a new moral charge. Not for me to tell the Académie Française how to do their job, but maybe the French “spolier” is even more well suited to this modern usage, because a spoiler doesn’t just ruin a film in the present, it is the theft of future pleasure.