If you go back to newspapers from the early years of the 20th century and read the sports pages, you’ll often find the local team’s opponents referred to as representatives of the city in which they play. Thus you’d find “yesterday the Chicagos defeated the local nine in a hard-fought game which ended only minutes before darkness fell.”

There’s a sudden rise in interest and an increasing number of reporters and publications refusing to call the Washington NFL representative by its long-held name “Redskins.” From The Huffington Post:

Slate and Mother Jones aren’t the only news outlets that have stopped using the name. The Kansas City Star’s public editor wrote in September 2012 that he sees “no compelling reason for any publisher to reprint an egregiously offensive term as a casual matter of course.”

In October 2012, the Washington City Paper in D.C. declared that it would refer to the team as the “the Washington Pigskins.”

Maybe they should all take hints from their predecessors.