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JAMES J. KILPATRICK
Universal Press Syndicate
Some months ago USAir set out to promote its shuttle service. After flying only 20,000 miles, a passenger would be rewarded with a free round trip. “With the competition,” the airline boasted, “you’ve got miles to go before you reap.”
Literary types must have loved the allusion. They instantly recognized the takeoff on Robert Frost’s famous poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” On the darkest evening of the year, with a heavy snow falling, a country man stops his little horse beside some woods that are “lovely, dark and deep.” He would like to stay and watch the woods fill up with snow, “but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.”
I delighted in the ad, for I revel in Frost’s complexly simple poetry, but then I began to wonder: How many newspaper readers grasped the allusion? More to the point, how many prosepctive passengers on the shuttle grasped the sweetness on the desert air? Or was it effective communication with the perceived audience?
You will see that I am warming up to another column on a writer’s need to know the readers for whom he (or she) is writing. Let me test you on other allusions:
• About this time last year, The Associated Press reported that “the Senate approved 41 presidental appointees in one fell swoop.”
• The drama editor of The Indianapolis Star gave good marks to a local staging of “Nunsense,” the musical comedy about some daffily inspried sisters in a convent. All in all, the play is “not a bad nunnery to get thee to.”
• The Seattle Post-Intellingcer headlined a story about automobile manufacturers and their published claims of high reliability: “Big Three hoisted by own petard.”
• In the Chicago Sun-Times, a
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