Opinion: And I thought KKK stood for kewl komputer kid

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A few years ago I shook my head when a much younger colleague -- now a rising star at The Times -- included what seemed to me a gratuitous piece of information in a political story. Reporting on a rumble in the Senate over Democratic filibusters of President Bush’s judicial nominations, she noted: ‘The fight between Republicans and Democrats inflamed passions to the point where Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, the third ranking Republican, drew parallels between the ‘hubris’ of Democrats and that of German dictator Adolf Hitler.’

‘As opposed to all the other Hitlers?’ I asked myself at the time, shifting into middle-aged-cranky mode. Who didn’t know that Hitler was a German dictator? Would we have to begin referring to Jesus as ‘the first-century religious teacher whom many believe to have risen from the dead’? Or the Civil War as ‘a 19th century conflict between North and South over slavery’?

I had the same reaction -- only stronger -- this week when I read a Reuters story about a federal appeals court overturning the kidnapping and conspiracy conviction of a former Ku Klux Klansman charged with holding two black men at gunpoint while companions beat and killed them in 1964. The story included this helpful historical aside: ‘The secret group, known for its white robes and pointed hoods, formed in the U.S. South after the Civil War to reassert white supremacy and enforce racial segregation, terrorizing blacks with lynchings, cross-burning and murders.’

Oh, that Ku Klux Klan!

But maybe I’m judging the Reuters reporter unfairly. In the 1959 edition of ‘The Elements of Style’ -- the usage bible I first encountered in high school -- E.B.White argued for spelling out the full names of organizations like the NAACP because babies were being born all the time who one day would scratch their heads over what the letters stood for. Later editions removed the NAACP example, perhaps because ‘colored people’ had become politically incorrect. But White’s point about showing consideration for new generations of readers is a valid one. A baby was born today who doesn’t know what ‘lol’ means.

Instead of bewailing the fact that some newspaper readers don’t know that Hitler was a dictator or that KKK members wore pointed hoods, maybe I should be grateful that these whippersnappers are reading the newspaper at all. Or perhaps I should say: ‘reading the newspaper, a primitive precursor of the Internet made of wood pulp.’