Y.M. on linguistic "playfulness"

On the subject of “Deviations from l’arbitraire du signe”:

There arises the possibility of elevating playfulness to the same kind of pedestal  as economy and clarity, particularly on the strength of linguistic developments where emotional coloration has been achieved  at the expense of economy, or clarity, or both.

-- Yakov Malkiel, “The Inflectional Paradigm”, in W. Lehmann & Y. Malkiel, Directions for Historical Linguistics (1968), p. 32

[For the full essay, to which this is an update, see:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/04/die-frohliche-wissenschaft-lo-gai-saber.html ]