Where is my avocado flip phone?

Years ago now (1998? my memory gets so hazy) a friend of mine told me about seeing a man in the Loop yelling instructions to his broker--"No! Sell! SELL!!"--into a hot dog held to his ear. Since that moment, I've coveted a cell phone shaped like a food item. In fact, I think I may have even said something rash like I wouldn't get a cell phone until novelty models were available.

Well, where are they? I honestly expected that the market would be flooded by now with everything from Maxwell Smart shoe phones to Garfield dolls with pectoral keypads and articulated mouth speakers. But the closest I've seen to something like this are those refitted retro phones that are big enough to be useful for self-defence, which are apparently finally turning up among niche retailers in Chicago. This is a far cry from mobile phones shaped like SanRio characters at your local Target.

On a related note, we were trying to chronologise when our default assumption about a person apparently talking to no one flipped from "crazy person" to "headset/earpiece wearer". One of my co-workers suggests 2003/4, which sounds about right, but I find it impossible to feel certain.

A little Levantine

Part of the rambling multihour conversation in the car on the way down to STL was a debate about the origins of the term "Levant" in the sense of "the eastern littoral of the Mediterranean". bunj was arguing that it was anachronistic to use it for the Era of the Crusades since it isn't attested with this meaning in English before 1497; the only term he found in his original sources, he told us, was trémière (from Latin trans mare "across [the] sea"). e. and on, on the other hand, pointed out that cognates of Levant had been in use in Romance languages for centuries before then with the general meaning of "east", but we couldn't provide a date for when it acquired its specific geographic identification.

I've since had time to do a little more sleuthing and have uncovered some interesting facts:

• In French, levant first occurs with the meaning of "east" in the Chanson de Roland, but it's the 15th century before it comes to mean "the Levantine countries".
• Similarly, llevant in the sense of "east" is found in the Catalan works of Raymond Llull, but the first attestation of a specific geographical application is a chronicle from 1455.
• In Italian, however, Levante begins to be used in this sense from "around the 13th-14th centuries", according to the Vocabolario Treccani.
• A survey of our various dictionaries of Mediaeval Latin shows that both transmare and levans seem to be sparsely attested, but there is a citation in the Niermeyer of "Genova, XIII [cent.]" for the latter with the meaning we're interested in.

So it does seem to be an expression that comes into use only at the end of the Crusader period after all.