Is loitering really so bad?
E. Cobham Brewer seems, from his most famous work, the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, published 1870, an agreeable old cove. But a biographical sketch by his grandson in the centenary edition praised his fearlessness in taking a stick to a ‘rough-looking man asleep in the stable’. He belaboured ‘the trespasser… exclaiming “Be off, you scoundrel!”’ This came to mind when I saw a sign prohibiting loitering. I wondered what exactly loitering was. The OED suggests as a meaning ‘to linger idly about a place’ and remarks that the verb appears ‘frequently in legal phrase to loiter with intent (to commit a felony)’. But now there are no felonies, only