In Praise of Play

It’s July 4th, a warm, sunny day when we have a great deal to do—food to buy, hamburgers to grill, bonfires to light, friends to talk to (oh, and food to eat). We’ve hardly even watched any Independence Day movies yet!

There’s a way in which holidays can be a gigantic chore, but they can also be pure play, if you choose to make them so. And I don’t just mean holidays are play for children. Children do have a greater need to play than adults do, just as they have a greater need for sleep, but play isn’t a kid-thing any more than sleep is. It’s a human thing. And so, I want to use this July 4th to put in a plug for play.

Play is anything done primarily for its own sake, for the joy of it. You might get some practical benefit also—if, for example, you like to play by cooking, then you get a meal out of it at the end—but that’s secondary. Play can be a learning experience, a creative process of discovery, a way to exercise your mind and body, a way to make friends. Play can be a means of processing through trauma or the gateway to a new career. But none of that is why we play. We play to play. It’s a light-hearted thing, a fun thing, an escape from the necessity to produce, produce, produce! No, you do not have to produce. Not all the time. You can play.

How do I play?

Being a writer, I often play with words. Over the past few months, I’ve been playing by creating a new language. It’s not just a matter of making up words, though of course that’s part of it. There’s also grammar and usage. There is figuring out how English actually works, how the words and phrases function, so that I can figure out how to accomplish the same functions with the very different grammar and usage of Itarish (Itarish grammar is actually closer to that of Latin, though not identical). I’ve got over twenty-six hundred words, now, and that’s only base words—each base word has multiple forms, depending on tenses and cases and so forth. I don’t have the whole thing memorized, so if I want to use my language, I have to look up the words I want—a spreadsheet with a search function makes this much easier. But I sometimes amuse myself by translating common phrases.

“Odlah. IrTashas oirLae MetdieNah EhrInigo-Montoya. IrNethe MetdiuhAruah ehrTas oirLae. NediouOsah ruah.”

If you spot the familiar name in the middle of that quote, you can probably figure out what the quote is.

Maybe this doesn’t sound fun to you. Maybe it sounds like a giant pile of pointless work. And it is pointless, and it is a lot of work. But that’s exactly what makes it play—I don’t need to justify this by saying it’s useful or important. I don’t need to prove it’s a particularly good constructed language (though of course I think it’s excellent). I don’t even need you to agree with me that it sounds like fun. I do it anyway because I want to. It’s not hurting anybody. And that’s enough.

How do you play? Is any of your play writing?