Prefer plain meaning.

Words are to be understood in their ordinary, everyday meanings—unless the context indicates that they bear a technical sense.

“The enlightened patriots who framed our constitution, and the people who adopted it, must be understood to have employed words in their natural sense, and to have intended what they have said.”

Chief Justice John Marshall,

Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. (9 Wheat.) 1, 71 (1824).

The ordinary-meaning rule is the most fundamental semantic rule of interpretation.1 It governs constitutions, statutes, rules, and private instruments. Interpreters should not be required to divine arcane nuances or to discover hidden meanings. Justice Joseph Story’s words are as true today as they were when written in the middle of the 19th century, and they are true not just of constitutions but of all other legal instruments:

[E]very word employed in the constitution is to be expounded in its plain, obvious, and common sense, unless the context furnishes some ground to control, qualify, or enlarge it. Constitutions are not designed for metaphysical or logical subtleties, for niceties of expression, for critical propriety, for elaborate shades of meaning, or for the exercise of philosophical acuteness or judicial research. They are instruments of a practical nature, founded on the common business of human life, adapted to common wants, designed for common use, and fitted for common understandings.2