This week, people who hadn’t yet caught up on Game of Thrones were pleading with especial desperation that people who had should avoid “spoilers” while discussing it, on the internet sites designed for discussing such things that the first group of people nonetheless insisted on reading. But when did “spoilers” become the name for the most heinous sin in pop-culture fandom?

A “spoiler” (from 1535) was originally a pillager or plunderer, and later anything that spoiled or marred. (In cars and aeroplanes, a spoiler is something that destroys lift.) From the mid-20th century, a spoiler was a sportsperson who harmed the chances of someone else winning without having a shout themselves, and this sense spread into politics, too. (So, for instance, Green Party nominee Ralph Nader was arguably a spoiler for Democrat Al Gore in the 2000 US presidential election.)

Surprisingly, the modern sense was coined as far back as 1971, when the American comedy writer Douglas Kenney gave away movie endings in National Lampoon magazine, with “a selection of ‘spoilers’ guaranteed to reduce the risk of unsettling and possibly dangerous suspense”. This will disappoint those who assume that fear of spoilers just proves how today’s young people are easily triggered snowflakes. And by the way, the dragons did it.