Mr Roger Broad, a reader who lives in an area of London I would call Westbourne Park, though he might disagree, writes to tell me that a friend of his, born in Istanbul of varied extraction, does not mind being called a Levantine. Mr Broad thought that it might have derogatory connotations, although he admits this might be merely attributable to an overdose of Bulldog Drummond.
I can’t find that the dictionaries have detected such a negative sense. The Levant is what the Crusaders called Outremer. (Or, in Spain, it is the east coast of the Iberian peninsula, the Valencian territories. But then, in Spain, a slightly old-fashioned word for groceries is ultramarinos, brought, as it were, from Outremer to the domestic Levant.)
Mr Broad also touches on a clear semantic change when he asks in passing whatever happened to the Near East.
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