Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 782.0

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Unit: $U56

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Cite as: 529 U. S. 694 (2000)

707

Opinion of the Court

course, dispositive (although the emphasis placed upon it by
Justice Scalia might suggest otherwise, see post, at 718–
719). What it does do, however, is to soften the strangeness
of Congress’s unconventional sense of “revoke” as allowing a
“revoked” term of supervised release to retain vitality after
It shows that saying a “revoked” term of super-
revocation.
vised release survives to be served in prison following the
court’s reconsideration of it is consistent with a secondary
but recognized deﬁnition, and so is saying that any balance
not served in prison may survive to be served out as super-
vised release.

A ﬁnal textually based point is that the result of recogniz-
ing Congress’s unconventional usage of “revoke” is far less
remarkable even than the unconventional usage. Let us
suppose that Congress had legislated in language that un-

usual meaning of its words where acceptance of that meaning . . . would
thwart the obvious purpose of the statute’ ”) (quoting Helvering v. Ham-
mel, 311 U. S. 504, 510–511 (1941); In re Chapman, 166 U. S. 661, 667 (1897)
(“[N]othing is better settled, than that statutes should receive a sensible
construction, such as will effectuate the legislative intention, and, if possi-
ble, so as to avoid an unjust or an absurd conclusion”). When text implies
that a word is used in a secondary sense and clear legislative purpose is
at stake, Justice Scalia’s cocktail-party textualism, post, at 718, must
yield to the Congress of the United States.
(Not that we consider usage
at a cocktail party a very sound general criterion of statutory meaning: a
few nips from the ﬂask might actually explain the solecism of the dissent’s
gunner who “revoked” his bird dog, post, at 719–720, n. 4; in sober mo-
ments he would know that dogs cannot be revoked, even though sentenc-
ing orders can be. His mistake, in any case, tells us nothing about how
Congress may have used “revoke” in the statute. The gunner’s error is,
as Justice Scalia notes, one of current usage.
(It is not merely that we
do not “revoke” dogs in a “literal” sense today, as Justice Scalia puts it;
we do not revoke them at all.) The question before us, however, is one
of deﬁnition as distinct from usage: when Congress employed the modern
usage in providing that a term of supervised release could be revoked,
was it employing the most modern meaning of the term “revoke”? Usage
can be a guide but not a master in answering a question of meaning like
this one. Justice Scalia’s argument from the current unacceptability of
the dog and ox examples thus jeopardizes sound statutory construction
rather more severely than his sportsman ever threatened a bird.)