From Elaine Hanning.
MERIDIAN … shame on you!
Far from being franglais (JEP, 16 August) Connétable is a fine old Norman-French word derived from Latin. It was the Normans who developed the art of mounted warfare and their use of cavalry proved decisive at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. William, Duke of Normandy and King of England, therefore had a Count of the Stable (Conestable, derived from the Latin Comes Stabuli) but by 1066 the Normans had already begun to drop the sound of ‘s’ before a consonant. Therefore, they introduced the word into English as they said it: ‘Connétable’.
Connétable is the title of the head of the parish not only by custom, and as such accepted informally by the community, but also written and so enshrined in law. In English, some 80 per cent of the words we use are of foreign origin, but that is certainly not the case here where the term Connétable has come down to us directly from the native Norman-French of our Island.
Meridian as published in the Jersey Evening Post ‘Under the Clock’ is an entity, an amalgam of all that is true and honest and a bit old-fashioned about Jersey: a repository of old saws and sayings. He (and he is always he, even when ‘he’ is ‘she’) reminds modern Jerseymen and women of the value of retaining those remnants of temps passé which show that while we are proud to be British, we are not, and never will be, English.
The definition of ‘franglais’, by the way, is not of French words borrowed and used in English, of which we have a large and honourable vocabulary, but of the mangling of the languages so that the result is not comprehensible to any French speaker. I will finish with a grand example of franglais:
In the matter of the Connétables of Jersey and their election … je reste ma valise.
Le Pèrrotchet, Palace Drive, St Saviour.

Meridian was not suggesting that the word ‘Connétable’ is itself an example of franglais, just its increasingly prevalent use in otherwise English sentences. – Editor.