tobruk, either structure is grammatically acceptable and expresses the same meaning: in both cases, the action is negated. Your first rendering negates the infinitive "to play"; your second rendering negates the verb "play". You may be a victim of the imposition of an entirely silly "rule" about split infinitives. In English, a split infinitive occurs when a word intervenes between the to and the verb of an infinitive (as in "to not play"). Beginning in the early 1900s, some prescriptive grammarians decided that, because Latin infinitives were never split, English infinitives should also never be split. This rule is silly for two reasons: First, Latin infinitives are always single words (unlike the English two-word structure), so Latin infinitives can't be split. Second, English speakers have been splitting infinitives since at least Old English times (see the Beowulf poem for some hearty examples), with split infinitives the preferred structure when adverbs modify the infinitives. Perhaps the most famous split infinitive of modern times appears in the opening monologue of Star Trek, when Captain Kirk says that the mission of the Starship Enterprise is "to boldly go where no man has gone before". This resonant phrase would limp badly if it were revised "boldly to go" or "to go boldly". Bottom line, take it as your mission to boldly split infinitives to your heart's content. Lune