Cite as: 527 U. S. 41 (1999)
Scalia, J., dissenting
ing in a public place," ante, at 66, is a distortion. The ordinance does not apply to "standing," but to "remain[ing]"— a term which in this context obviously means "[to] endure or persist," see American Heritage Dictionary 1525 (1992). There may be some ambiguity at the margin, but "remain[ing] in one place" requires more than a temporary stop, and is clear in most of its applications, including all of those represented by the facts surrounding respondents' arrests described supra, at 82-83.
As for the phrase "with no apparent purpose": Justice O'Connor again distorts this adjectival phrase, by separating it from the word that it modifies. "[A]ny person standing on the street," her concurrence says, "has a general 'purpose'—even if it is simply to stand," and thus "the ordinance permits police officers to choose which purposes are permissible." Ante, at 66. But Chicago police officers enforcing the ordinance are not looking for people with no apparent purpose (who are regrettably in oversupply); they are looking for people who "remain in any one place with no apparent purpose"—that is, who remain there without any apparent reason for remaining there. That is not difficult to perceive.11
The Court's attempt to demonstrate the vagueness of the ordinance produces the following peculiar statement: "The 'no apparent purpose' standard for making [the decision to
11 Justice Breyer asserts that "one always has some apparent purpose," so that the policeman must "interpret the words 'no apparent purpose' as meaning 'no apparent purpose except for . . . .' " Ante, at 70. It is simply not true that "one always has some apparent purpose"—and especially not true that one always has some apparent purpose in remaining at rest, for the simple reason that one often (indeed, perhaps usually) has no actual purpose in remaining at rest. Remaining at rest will be a person's normal state, unless he has a purpose which causes him to move. That is why one frequently reads of a person's "wandering aimlessly" (which is worthy of note) but not of a person's "sitting aimlessly" (which is not remarkable at all). And that is why a synonym for "purpose" is "motive": that which causes one to move.
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