But in the hands of the playwright Elizabeth Swados, it means funny business, as well as an opportunity to savor the playful pleasures of reading.
Some are completely whimsical, such as the strange description of evolution from "misty spray" through a series of substances and insects to horses and humans (chapter 18), while a few other passages seem to be sheer playful nonsense which read like Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky".
(Picture book; ages 4 to 7) Yarlett's amusing story of a brother and sister whose inability to share causes a problem of astronomical proportions is full of playful design elements that make reading it a visual pleasure.
"It's provocative but it's also really sexy and playful," says Hill. "I loved reading about Gaultier's interest in corsets and girdles and how that relates back to his childhood when women weren't really wearing foundation garments like that and when he saw these pieces in his grandmother's closet, he thought they looked so antiquated and strange.
Rapids is a cute new kids app from Amazon using a playful chat style to help kids ages seven to twelve enjoy reading.
I'm being rather brazen about this and standing up against the opposition, because it's my deepest belief that you can be at once serious and yet easy to read and playful.
"There is one story and one story only," Graves said, which is not true; but the resulting love poems, with their continual sense of threat and change, ought to be read alongside playful anthology pieces such as "The Persian Version" and "Welsh Incident".
Though unexpected, the optical details of Forero's work read as playful and friendly, not subversive.
Games journalists Leigh Alexander and Laura Hudson are launching OffWorld, a "place for curious and playful grown-ups" to read about games, and that.
Full of playful, boomeranging, sometimes unnerving rhymes and a brilliantly disconcerting twist, it's ideal reading for anyone who doesn't know when to stop.
