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MUSCARELLO v. UNITED STATES

Opinion of the Court

“carries a ﬁrearm.” Because they essentially agree that
Congress intended the phrase to convey its ordinary, and not
some special legal, meaning, and because they argue the lin-
guistic point at length, we too have looked into the matter
in more than usual depth. Although the word “carry” has
many different meanings, only two are relevant here. When
one uses the word in the ﬁrst, or primary, meaning, one can,
as a matter of ordinary English, “carry ﬁrearms” in a wagon,
car, truck, or other vehicle that one accompanies. When one
uses the word in a different, rather special, way, to mean, for
example, “bearing” or (in slang) “packing” (as in “packing a
gun”), the matter is less clear. But, for reasons we shall set
out below, we believe Congress intended to use the word in
its primary sense and not in this latter, special way.

Consider ﬁrst the word’s primary meaning. The Oxford
English Dictionary gives as its ﬁrst deﬁnition “convey, origi-
nally by cart or wagon, hence in any vehicle, by ship, on
horseback, etc.”
2 Oxford English Dictionary 919 (2d ed.
1989); see also Webster’s Third New International Diction-
ary 343 (1986) (ﬁrst deﬁnition: “move while supporting (as in
a vehicle or in one’s hands or arms)”); Random House Dic-
tionary of the English Language Unabridged 319 (2d ed.
1987) (ﬁrst deﬁnition: “to take or support from one place to
another; convey; transport”).

The origin of the word “carries” explains why the ﬁrst, or
basic, meaning of the word “carry” includes conveyance in a
vehicle. See Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology 146 (1988)
(tracing the word from Latin “carum,” which means “car” or
“cart”); 2 Oxford English Dictionary, supra, at 919 (tracing
the word from Old French “carier” and the late Latin “carri-
care,” which meant to “convey in a car”); Oxford Dictionary
of English Etymology 148 (C. Onions ed. 1966) (same); Barn-
hart Dictionary of Etymology, supra, at 143 (explaining that
the term “car” has been used to refer to the automobile
since 1896).