Cite as: 529 U. S. 694 (2000)
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 revocation. It shows that saying a "revoked" term of supervised 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 supervised release.
A final textually based point is that the result of recognizing 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 unusual meaning of its words where acceptance of that meaning . . . would thwart the obvious purpose of the statute' ") (quoting Helvering v. Hammel, 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 possible, 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 moments he would know that dogs cannot be revoked, even though sentencing 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.)
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