It's a simple game: take a word and see how many different parts of speech it can be. We played with our spelling words. A Shakespeare word is a word that works as a noun, a verb, or an adjective, depending on context. For example, chalk. "I have a piece of chalk" -- noun. "This is a chalk board" -- adjective. "I chalk the wall" -- verb. Shakespeare word.
For 2nd graders, the challenge is to find Shakespeare words by using different words as different parts of speech. It's actually surprisingly hard; try to use the word man as at least three different parts of speech. You'll find that it is, in fact, a Shakespeare word, though a weak one because as an adjective it doesn't always lend much to the context. Fell was a big surprise, and became one of our favorites in composition assignments. I read plenty of inventive paragraphs about fell beasts and monsters during the weeks after fell.
In 3rd grade, the game is a little different. The students are more confident with their basic usage, so the challenge is to actually create a Shakespeare word. It's wonderful to speak English (modern English; I'm not sure if Old English is as conducive to this game), where nouns are already packed with action and verbs are centrally focused on a thing. It's actually quite simple to slip a word into an unfamiliar usage. It just takes a little creativity.
So we did a few practice rounds where I'd provide an example and the students would try to imitate. The example was "I chess you." I used a noun as a verb, but "chess" in that sentence conveys meaning as a verb. All of my students knew what I meant by that. It meant, "I defeat you in chess," or (my favorite interpretation by a thumotic student) "I triumph in chess over you." It's on its way to becoming an idiom in our classroom. We had a rash of imitation--"I leg you," "I war you," etc. We were getting the idea.
Then one student raised her hand and said, "I've got one! I book the world." Everything stopped then to listen. She said it again. "I book the world." I asked her what she meant, then stopped her and asked her classmates what she meant. A student raised his hand and said that she meant she shut the world, the whole world, in the pages of a book. The rest of the class agreed; she meant that she took the world and put it in a book. I asked her if they had understood her correctly, and she said yes.
I didn't know how to tell them, but at that moment, we watched poetry happen. We watched language, simple words that we all knew, take on a completely different form. We heard things that had never been heard before. My 8-year-old student said something new. She'd felt something universal--the longing to express reality in written form--and she'd used a fresh composition to communicate it purely and accurately to her listeners.
It is a beautiful childlike hope, to put real things into a book, to word the world truly and well. It requires a conviction that the world is composed of real things that are worth knowing. But it also involves the childlike certainty that these things can in fact be known. Communication is based on faith, faith first that the world is able to be known, and then that it is able to be shared be rational minds. In this 8-year-old's boldness to accept the challenge of making something new, the whole classroom made a small step towards participating in the miracle of communication, towards putting real, true things into words and giving them to listeners.
May we all have the boldness of this double faith, and may it give freshness and depth to our language towards each other in the quest to seek out the real nature of things and (not to be forgotten) to share this reality. May we book the world!
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