From 'playerish' to playing in the dark: Wenger and Monroe

Not often one can get a Premier League football manager, and the 20th century's greatest sexual icon, into one week's post about play... But here we go...

Firstly, Arsene Wenger, the manager of Arsenal F.C., exulting over the performance of his team in their recent victory over Spurs, and inventing a new word in the process:

It was a performance worthy of adding a new word to the footballing vocabulary. "I'm very excited with this team because - I don't know if the word exists - they are 'playerish'," said Wenger."They love to play and that is something that you feel from the outside. They love to play. Even at 2-1 they don't go to the corner flag, they continue to try to score."

And secondly, the Guardian's reprint of an interview with Marilyn Monroe in 1962, contains this unbearably poignant passage:

When I was five I think, that's when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn't like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries. It goes beyond house; you could make your own situations and you could pretend, and even if the other kids were a little slow on the imagining part, you could say, "Hey, what about if you were such and such, and I were such and such, wouldn't that be fun?" And they'd say, "Oh, yes," and then I'd say, "Well, that will be a horse and this will be ..."

It was play, playfulness. When I heard that this was acting, I said that's what I want to be. You can play. But then you grow up and find out about playing, that they make playing very difficult for you. Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I'd sit all day and way into the night. Up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it. I loved anything that moved up there and I didn't miss anything that happened and there was no popcorn either.