What is "playful"

Usage examples of "playful".

Calabria wheedling, remonstrating, cajoling and patronizing the new master by turns, now for his misguided notions of fairness in dealing with the striking miners, now for the uses of influence in getting ahead, breaking off for a highly theatrical interlude of mugging and arson and here came the playful glissando again as new comic possibilities emerged in the parade of petty thieves, rumpots, fugitives from wives and creditors and a brace of Chippewa Indians being cursorily questioned, pummeled, browbeaten, paid and fleeced as recruits for the Union army by the mine manager in his time away from raising stores of vermifuges, decorative sabres, trusses and mule feed cut with sand in the patriotic cause.

For the rest, it is virtually impossible to determine precisely which are playful inventions, mistakes, or intentional misattributions by Stendhal.

Out of these questions emerge the concerns of innumerable feminists that postmodernism and deconstruction may very well theorize to an abstraction the lived experience of women or divert attention away from mistreatment in the rush to revel in the more playful eccentricities of theory and ambiguity.

Around the circle some of the males sparred, sudden, snarling encounters that ended almost as quickly as they began, and Cherenkova found herself unsure if the bouts were serious or playful.

The Weaver picks up its legs one by knifepoint one and treads at the edge of the ravine and it dances along it as the uncoloured women and men edge behind it and it turns its head in sly playful slide to stare at them with a constellation of eyes like black eggs.

Haagedorn, left for an unfortunate moment to face the bowling, succumbed to a really nasty and almost unplayable ball which curled round his feet like a playful kitten and skittled his leg-stump.

Count Anteoni looked after him, and then at Domini, with a sort of playful surprise.

Through the wide range of repetitions where all the levels of composition and structure concur in a common Donjuanesque examination of time, Kundera achieves a fascinating novelistic synthesis in which the esthetic, erotic, ethical, playful and cognitive functions combine as in a single semantic river.

In the final analysis, the donjuanesque journey does not in any way intend an escape from chronology, rather a playful deconstruction and reconstruction of it.

Broad shoulders rippled, and batlike ears and long, lashing tails bobbed exultantly as they came bounding along like playful orcs, black eyes snapping with glee.

Their own bands had no enthusiasm for joining in, the playful competition across the lines, each side trying to outdo the other.

The brief demand was gentle enough, yet it contained a sort of playful irony, which, at the moment, Jessie Mowbray resented.

She reached out with both her hand and her mind and found that Oakleaf was a lively gelding, young and playful but with no vice in him.

The striking photograph and quick, playful headline created instant identification with the advertiser and represented the kind of products that could be found at the store.

Colonel Shithead to screw himself, but Drew and Westy warned me not to get playful.