Criminal law and procedure

The twenty-second entry is l’interpellation, and an English reader who knows the word at all knows it from the wrong building. « An interpellation » is a formal question put to a minister in a continental parliament, the kind that can end in a vote of confidence; it is a political term, and rarely heard in Britain. In a French police report l’interpellation is the moment officers stop somebody and take them in: le suspect a été interpellé à la sortie du métro. It is not yet a charge, and not quite an arrest in the English sense, since nothing has been decided, but it is certainly not a question. Newspapers use it every day, trois interpellations après les heurts, and a reader who pictures three debates has misread the whole story. The verb keeps two gentler uses. Interpeller quelqu’un can simply mean to call out to somebody in the street, and ça m’interpelle, a phrase people enjoy mocking, says that something strikes or troubles the speaker. The parliamentary sense survives too, but beside a list of criminal procedure it is the pavement that should come to mind.