Shakespeares plays have had an enormous impact on art for generations, but perhaps his biggest impact was on our language itself. Many people don’t realize that Shakespeare is credited with coining over 1700 of the words we commonly use in our language today. Before he used them, they just weren’t part of our vocabulary.
How did he do it? Sometimes he made them up out of whole cloth, other times he added two existing words together to add a new or slightly better meaning. Often he would make nouns into verbs or verbs into adjectives. He was taking creative license to build the meaning of his plays and scripts using whatever raw tools the language gave him and, when there wasn’t any current tool to use, creating new literary tools/words.
In the same way, non-profit leaders need to be creating healthy organizations using whatever tools they have available to them, and when there just doesn’t seem to be the right answer readily available, sitting down and trying to create solutions that no one else has tried before.
Undoubtedly this was a rough discipline for Shakespeare, but then he did make his mark through his work. If we hope to do so, we’ll have to do the hard, creative labor to make the world a better place by creating new, creative ways to reach those we serve by modifying, changing, morphing, and imagining new and better ways to help others.
David Curry
