A Good Word: Play

Now that my kid can grab onto a basket and dump it out, her toys take approximately six seconds to litter the floor. She likes things that she can bang on other things. She likes things that fit in her mouth or that move when she pushes them. Right now we can’t figure out whether her tower-knocking-over skills are due to intention or just clumsiness.

She is not the only one who plays with these toys. Her grandparents do. Friends we invite over do. Someone gets down on the floor to play with the baby, and she engages for awhile in the tower they are building, or rattle they shake at her. But sooner or later her attention spotlight shifts to something else. Or she’s hungry or needs her nose wiped, and she moves away. And — I’ve seen it more than once, the person keeps playing, without the baby. I’ve caught myself doing it too.

Play is a fulsome word. The Oxford English Dictionary has a multipage exploration of its usage and origins, including this definition:

Exercise or activity engaged in for enjoyment or recreation rather than for a serious or practical purpose; amusement, entertainment, diversion; (in later use esp.) the spontaneous or organized recreational activity of children.

Many in the early education business many refer play as “the work of a child.” This is to to dignify it and the time spent at it. We all know what work is, and we know to respect it. Work, that is, production of things, is usually the way we ascribe value to action.

To many characters in The Dispossessed, a novel by Ursula K. LeGuin to which I return again and again, work and play are understood to be one and the same. The intentional lunar community of Anarres is communalist. Their invented language has a single word which means both work and play. Or more specifically, useful activity.

Babies are very repetitive in their work-play. They don’t make anything. They smack a surface again and again. Will it make the same noise every time? Will the other person always reappear at the end of peekaboo? Beside them, we absent-mindedly stack the blocks. We ask, will gravity still work this time? It does, and we groan when the tower falls. We make like it’s a tragedy, but we are reassured. Play is an antidote for fear. It is dirt to grow hope in.

Stack some blocks. Drive a toy car around and up and over a bump in the rug. What will happen this time?