Shakespeare Puns
Upon his death in Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio announces, "Ask for me tomorrow and you will find me a ______ man," playing on ideas of death and seriousness.
grave
Though one would think that the label for a conversation between characters was pretty common knowledge, one student defined this as "foreshadowing of plot events" on a test.
Dialogue
Lady Macbeth's lines, "That which cries, 'Thus thou must do,' if thou have it," rely on the relative pronoun's similarity to another word.
witch
This misspelling of Juliet's last name made it into the group chat.
Lady Copulate
When the titular Titus announces, "Hark, villains! I will grind your bones to dust / And with your blood and it I'll make a paste / And of the paste a ______ I will rear / And make two pasties of your shameful heads," he refers to the archaic dual meaning of this word, referring to both pie crusts and boxes for burial.
Coffin OR Casket
Reading aloud from a list of states, one of my students insisted that this gambling-friendly state was pronounced with "ə" replacing the "a" sounds.
Neh-vuh-duh
In the beginning lines of Richard III, “Now is the winter or our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York," the pun is determined by the lineage of the speaker.
Son
Since an airport is a place, one of my students argued with me that the word "airport" had to be this type of modifier, since it answers the question "where?"
Adverb
In Much Ado About Nothing, Beatrice describes Claudio as “neither sad, nor sick, nor merry, nor well: but civil, count; civil as an orange, and something of that jealous complexion," referring to this city in Spain.
Seville
Though we have no state-required exam for 9th ELA and students have been told continuously that there isn't one for this class, about once a week in spring semester, I am asked if there is one of these for the course.
Milestones, EOC, or EOCT