... are concerned with discovering and giving effect to the purpose of which the legislation was made. The problem is that words do not always carry a plain and ordinary meaning or may carry ambiguous words as the R V Allen (1872), where applying the meaning 'being validly married' to the words 'shall marry' would have made the offence of bigamy unworkable. Ambiguous words is when a word ahs more than one meaning, allowing absurdity to occur as in Whitley V Chappel (1868) where a person did election fraud but was unpunished because it was held that a dead man would not be ' entitled to vote.' One big case showing how using the literal rule can lead to an absurd result was in Fisher V Bell (1960) where the words 'offer for sale' were used, allowing shop keepers to walk away free in selling knives at their shop. Shop keeper went unpunished ...

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