Ask Language Log: (Un) Leavened

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A.M. writes:

A novel contained the following sentence: "The tension between them had grown since the first meal, unleavened by the blond boy's arrogance."  I am not sure what the blond boy's arrogance did to the tension – furthered it, dampened it, had no influence?

So i put leavened/unleavened in a more general context (supported by Google searches, the results usually being in the polical sphere), still with no clear insights:

"A bad thing, unleavened by something good" -> still bad
"A bad thing , leavened by something good" -> bad, but better
"A bad thing, unleavened by something bad" -> ?
"A bad thing, leavened by something bad" -> ?

Just to make A.M.'s task harder, the web also yields cases of

"A generally good thing, leavened by a contrary good thing"→ better or at least saved from a kind of badness:

Free speech leavened by a thing called judgment.
Utter certainty, yet leavened by humility and doubt
STEM Education, Leavened by the Arts.

As well as good things leavened by bad things…

The basic metaphor is clear: When X is leavened by Y, a small admixture of Y changes X in an important way, just as a small admixture of yeast transforms a large mass of flour and water.

Interestingly, dictionaries have somewhat mixed opinions about the nature (and even the basic emotional valence) of metaphorical leavening:

MW gives "n. something that makes a situation or mood less serious / v. to make (something) less serious and often more exciting".

AHD gives: "n. An  element,  influence,  or  agent  that  works  subtly  to  lighten,  enliven,  or  modify  a  whole. v. To  pervade  with  a  lightening,  enlivening,  or  modifying  influence".

The Oxford Dictionary of English gives "n. a pervasive influence that modifies something or transforms it for the better: they acted as an intellectual leaven to the warriors who dominated the city. v. permeate and modify or transform (something) for the better: the proceedings should be leavened by humour | (as noun leavening) companies of Territorial Army volunteers with a leavening of regular soldiers.

But

The Century Dictionary (from 1895) gives "n. Something that resembles leaven in its effects, as some secret or impalpable influence working a general change, especially a change for the worse. v. To imbue; work upon by some invisible or powerful influence. Beware, ye that are magistrates, their sin doth leaven you all."

Wiktionary gives "Anything that makes a general assimilating (especially a corrupting) change in the mass. / v. To temper an action or decision. To imbue; to infect; to vitiate."

(I suspect that Wiktionary borrowed from the Century in this case.)

The sin-as-leaven metaphor is pervasive in the New Testament:

Matthew 16 —

[6] Then Jesus said unto them, Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.
[11] How is it that ye do not understand that I spake it not to you concerning bread, that ye should beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees?
[12] Then understood they how that he bade them not beware of the leaven of bread, but of the doctrine of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.

Mark 8:15 —

And he charged them, saying, Take heed, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, and of the leaven of Herod.

Luke 12:1 —

In the mean time, when there were gathered together an innumerable multitude of people, insomuch that they trode one upon another, he began to say unto his disciples first of all, Beware ye of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.

1 Corinthians 5:

[6] Your glorying is not good. Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump?
[7] Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us:
[8] Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

 This perspective on the metaphor apparently developed out of a somewhat different Old Testament theology of leavening, where the critical event is the flight from slavery in Egypt, when there was no time to let dough rise, and "unleavened bread" therefore became the symbol of inconvenience accompanying a sudden positive transformation.

In any case, both the Jewish and the Christian theologies of leavening seem to have faded in their influence on popular usage, and the basic metaphor has taken over. In most cases, the effect of metaphorical leavening is positive:

Cold of Winter Leavened By The Joy of Watching Graceful Merlins in Flight
Quite a frustrating day, only leavened by finding this lot at 50p each in charity shop.
But the horrors of that story about a 19th-century convict kept in a partially submerged cage in Tasmania were leavened by ribald humor and a style so lush that the sentences seemed to send tendrils off the pages  …
A gloomy existential message leavened by Cillian Murphy's comic virtuosity, Mikel Murfi’s physical language and Stephen Rea’s urbanity.
Life in Cuba after Fidel — Misery leavened by hope

But there are certainly negative examples as well:

The thrill of discovery is leavened by the risk of ruin
I anticipate the moment, but my joy is leavened by some fear and trepidation.
I never had second thoughts, but my happiness was leavened by the sting of regret you inevitably feel when you kill your own food instead of leaving the chore to someone else.
But now that she's shot ahead with heart-stopping speed, her pleasure is leavened by anxiety— she has so many more chances to fail, to see her luck run dry.

And of course there are also cases of one good thing leavened by another:

In Cuba, hope leavened by caution
He was a direct, good-hearted man of easy, confident authority leavened by a twinkle in the eye which showed that he understood this society he was living in …

None of this really helps to resolve A.M.'s puzzle. Google search tells me that the puzzling sentence came from the novel  Blood Song, and the wider context is

To Vaelin’s annoyance Nortah was second best, his arrows finding the bull with grating regularity. The tension between them had grown since the first meal, unleavened by the blond boy’s arrogance. He sneered at the failings of the other boys, usually behind their back, and spoke constantly of his family though none of the others did. Nortah spoke of his family’s lands, their many houses, the days he had spent hunting and riding with his father who he claimed was First Minister to the King.

In this context, "unleavened by" clearly means "made worse by". Presumably this happens because "leavened by" is equated with "made better by" or "improved by", and "unleavened by" is then interpreted as the opposite "made worse" rather than the negation "not made better".  I think that this is just careless writing, since unleavened by = made worse by is not a common usage, and is unexpected and confusing in this context to no good end.

 

 



30 Comments

  1. languagehat said,

    November 9, 2014 @ 9:47 am

    The Free Dictionary gives

    "The Free Dictionary" is simply an online avatar of the American Heritage Dictionary, which should surely get the credit.

    [(myl) Fixed now.]

  2. Coby Lubliner said,

    November 9, 2014 @ 10:01 am

    languagehat: it so happens that this particular citation is from AHD, but the Free Dictionary also includes Collins and Random House (and sometimes MW1913) for English, not to mention numerous dictionaries in other languages.

  3. Eric P Smith said,

    November 9, 2014 @ 10:16 am

    A word like “untied” can be a verb (the preterite or the past participle of the verb untie) or it can be an adjective (meaning not tied). But there is no verb unleaven, and so “unleavened” can only be an adjective, meaning not leavened. So if you are using English in a standard way, “X is unleavened by Y” can only mean “X is not leavened by Y”, and cannot by mean that Y has any influence on X at all.

    I agree with myl that “The tension between them had grown since the first meal, unleavened by the blond boy's arrogance” is just careless writing.

  4. Eric P Smith said,

    November 9, 2014 @ 10:17 am

    … and cannot mean …

  5. Callum said,

    November 9, 2014 @ 10:36 am

    It's difficult to interpret but I wonder why you rule out the negation "not made better" and plump for the stronger "made worse". I don't see that the context forces that reading. Instead, the "not made better" interpretation can simply be understatement:

    "The tension between them had grown since the first meal, made no better by the blond boy’s arrogance. He sneered at the failings of the other boys…"

    So I think they're using "unleavened" in a similar way as you would expect something like "unimproved" to function in a similar passage.

    [(myl) Good point. I guess both A.M. and I were confused by uncertainty about the valence of metaphorical leavening's change — but even "not modified by" would also sort of work. Anyhow, this was a good excuse to take a look at the apparent historical change in the leavening metaphor's connotations.]

  6. languagehat said,

    November 9, 2014 @ 10:40 am

    languagehat: it so happens that this particular citation is from AHD, but the Free Dictionary also includes Collins and Random House (and sometimes MW1913) for English, not to mention numerous dictionaries in other languages.

    Fair enough (I guess I'm used to finding the AHD there when I look up definitions), but surely the original dictionary should be credited, just as Mark Liberman should be cited as the author of the words in this post even if they're quoted at another site.

  7. Gregory Kusnick said,

    November 9, 2014 @ 1:17 pm

    If the author had written "unleavened by any sort of kindness" it would be clear that a desirable leavening agent was missing. On this reading, "unleavened by the blond boy’s arrogance" is jarring since it puts a negative quality (arrogance) where that hoped-for leavening agent would be expected.

  8. D.O. said,

    November 9, 2014 @ 2:03 pm

    It's a nice exegesis of leavened, but not unleavened. My brief Google search has shown that the latter is not much used outside bread-making context at all, especially if you exclude it's use in the band, books, and movie titles.

    [(myl) Try "unleavened by", in Google Books or in the news. Plenty of examples…]

  9. Adam Funk said,

    November 9, 2014 @ 3:35 pm

    Since "leaven of malice" has been mentioned, I feel obligated to put in a plug for Robertson Davies, who deserves to be better known and more widely read (although IMO the Cornish Trilogy is his best work).

  10. Rubrick said,

    November 9, 2014 @ 4:35 pm

    I wonder if some of the "leavening makes things less serious" examples result from a belief that "leaven" is cognate with "levity". Though of course real leavening does make things lighter and airier, so it's hard to know.

  11. Richard Badger said,

    November 9, 2014 @ 4:36 pm

    The Just the Word collocation website has no entries for "leavened" and the only collocation for "unleavened" is "bread".

  12. Jerry Friedman said,

    November 9, 2014 @ 6:39 pm

    Rubrick: etymonline says "leaven" is ultimately from Latin levare 'to raise', from levis 'lightweight', and "levity" is also from levis. So I think you're probably right, but the belief is true.

    "The tension between them had grown since the first meal, and the blond boy's arrogance had done nothing to leaven it" would have worked for me as an understatement, but the original doesn't work for me, I think for the reason Gregory Kusnick gave.

    I like Robertson Davies too.

  13. Eric P Smith said,

    November 9, 2014 @ 6:44 pm

    @Rubrick: I believe that 'leaven' is cognate with 'levity'. oxforddictionaries.com gives 'leaven' as being from Old French levain, based on Latin levamen 'relief' (literally 'means of raising'), from levare 'to lift'. 'Levity' is from Latin 'levis' light. 'Levare' comes from 'levis' and originally meant to lighten.

  14. Eric P Smith said,

    November 9, 2014 @ 6:46 pm

    Sorry, if I had refreshed the page before sending my comment I should have seen Jerry Friedman's comment.

  15. Jon Weinberg said,

    November 10, 2014 @ 9:48 am

    In Jewish tradition, not only was there said to be no time to let bread rise during the flight from Egypt, but Jewish ritual rules consequently prohibit the eating of leavened bread during Passover — which means that in the manufacture of Passover foods and for the duration of the holiday, leaven is viewed as a contaminant, with great care taken to avoid any accidental leavening in preparation. (On the other hand, leaven is great the rest of the year — it's not for nothing that Jewish tradition calls unleavened bread lachma onya, the bread of poverty.)

  16. J. W. Brewer said,

    November 10, 2014 @ 10:09 am

    The metaphor seems even more muddled because e.g. bread is unleavened because no leaven got put in the dough (and in the case of matzoh, steps were taken to provide any inadvertent exposure to ambient yeast equivalents). So it's a bit odd to say that X was "unleavened by" Y unless your point is that Y was not on the scene to start with (and/or was not on the scene because it was affirmatively kept away from the metaphorical dough). The notion here seems to be "Y was present but failed to have any notable transformative (whether positive or negative) effect on X," and . . . I'm not sufficiently experienced with breadmaking to know if there's a real-world analogy to that when you add what you thought would be efficacious yeast to the dough but the darn thing refuses to rise.

  17. Brett said,

    November 10, 2014 @ 3:17 pm

    There's an interesting linguistic point about "unleavened" bread and Hebrew. Until relatively recent times, leavening required yeast, and the frame of the passover story clearly equates levened bread with yeast-risen bread. After the development of quickbreads with chemical leavening agents, the Hebrew "matzo" was interpreted to mean "unleavened" bread, rather than "un-yeasted" bread. That interpretation was presumably chosen because it would help to preserve traditional practices, although it is less consonant with the exodus story.

  18. J. W. Brewer said,

    November 10, 2014 @ 3:40 pm

    @Brett, even if yeast was the only thing in common use as leaven for bread as of, say, 400 years ago (when the King James Version was done), the translators nonetheless used "leaven" (from Latin mediated via Old French) rather than the good old Anglo-Saxon word "yeast." In the NT they're mostly Englishing the Greek "zyme" (ζύμη); I don't know how the semantic range of that word (with or without taking account of subsequent technological change) compares to that of whatever Hebrew word(s) might be in the OT text they were rendering.

  19. J. W. Brewer said,

    November 10, 2014 @ 3:44 pm

    ζύμη ought to ring a faint bell for anyone who as a child looked at a set of encyclopedia volumes on the shelf and saw on the spine that the last volume covered the topics "X-Ray" (or whatever) through "Zymurgy."

  20. Adam Funk said,

    November 10, 2014 @ 3:53 pm

    "Zyme" ought to ring a bell … for homebrewers too!

  21. Bloix said,

    November 10, 2014 @ 5:17 pm

    To pick up on Jon Weinberg's comment – observant Jews, in Jesus' time and today, scrupulously clean their kitchens and homes before the Passover holiday in order to rid them of any trace of leavened products. In the quoted passages, Jesus is doing what he often does – he substitutes a new and metaphorical version of a traditional and literal practice.

  22. Michael Watts said,

    November 10, 2014 @ 9:33 pm

    ζύμη made me think of the word "enzyme". Etymonline gives enzyme as 'from Modern Greek enzymos "leavened", from en- "in" + zyme "leaven"'.

    Then, the Middle Liddell (through perseus) glosses ζύμη as leaven, or, in the new testament, metaphor for corruption, and the LSJ glosses it as "leaven" or "beer-yeast" (and also notes that it's a metaphor for corruption in the NT).

    There's a link to the verb ζέω, which I assume ζύμη derives from somehow, the relevant sense of which appears to be "ferment" (though the primary sense is "boil").

    But all that aside — suppose there's one method of doing something, and, logically, one word for the process. You leaven bread by adding leaven to it.

    When hundreds of years after your death somebody else develops a different type of leaven, and distinguishes it with a different word, so that you can leaven bread by adding leaven or by adding new TechnoloBrAdditive.

    How does it make sense for the people centuries later to ask whether, when you referred to "unleavened" bread, you meant bread that hadn't had leaven added to it in the leaving process, or bread that hadn't undergone the leavening process of having leaven added? Those are the same thing; you had no reason to distinguish them and no tools to do so.

  23. Brett said,

    November 10, 2014 @ 9:51 pm

    @Michael Watts: What I find interesting is that everyone, it seems, agrees that the correct translation (at both the linguistic and conceptual levels) is "unleavened bread," rather than "un-yeasted bread," even though the latter makes more sense in the context of the story.

  24. Jon Weinberg said,

    November 10, 2014 @ 10:50 pm

    Except that the Hebrew doesn't use the leavened/unleavened parallel formation. What KJV translates as unleavened bread is the Hebrew מַצּוֹת (matzot or matza), and what it translates as leavened bread is חָמֵץ (hametz). Since Numbers 6:3 refers to חֹמֶץ יַיִן (hametz of wine), usually translated as "wine vinegar", that suggests that חָמֵץ has less to do with yeast and more to do with some concept of fermentation — or ζέω .

  25. Jerry Friedman said,

    November 11, 2014 @ 12:45 am

    One more try:
    "The tension between them had grown since the first meal, undiminished by the blond boy’s arrogance."

    That doesn't work for me. It implies an expectation that the arrogance would diminish the tension and a surprise that it didn't.

    "The tension between them had grown since the first meal, not diminished by the blond boy’s arrogance."

    That works for me. "Not diminished" is a litotes for "increased". Something like "not diminished at all" or "no whit diminished" (if that's appropriate for this kind of medievalish fantasy) might be clearer.

  26. Michael Watts said,

    November 11, 2014 @ 3:18 am

    @Brett:

    How could "unleavened" be more or less correct than "un-yeasted"? If there is no leaven other than yeast, they are one and the same concept. But "unleavened" is already an established word and "un-yeasted" is an awkward nonce word ("yeastless" might be an improvement), so for contemporary translations I don't see a big mystery why they'd all go one way.

  27. Brett said,

    November 11, 2014 @ 8:38 am

    @Michael Watts: Because it's not just a linguistic issue. The exodus story clearly describes the Israelites inability to make yeasted bread (by the way, several dictionaries online appear to accept "yeasted" and even "unyeasted" as unremarkable words, although I don't think I'd ever actually encountered "unyeasted" before I used it yesterday); if they'd had baking soda, they would have been able to use that just fine. When chemical leaveners were developed, a decision had to be made about whether eating quick breads was permitted during Passover. (I suppose churches had to address the question too, since communion host is based on Passover matzo.) Yet when the prohibition on leavened bread is discussed, nobody seems to consider that the concept of leavening was, for technological reasons, much narrower when that prohibition was set down in the Iron Age.

  28. Michael Watts said,

    November 11, 2014 @ 9:27 am

    From a translation perspective, the distinction you're trying to draw only exists if the Israelites knew (1) that baking soda existed, and (2) that it could be used to cause bread dough to rise. If they didn't know, then the distinction is not available in the text; it has to be spuriously added by later readers whose view of the world is different. There is no way to choose between translations that distinguish "awful, flat bread" from "bread that wasn't treated with yeast, but might not be awful and flat because we used a non-yeast leavening agent", because the only kinds of bread that exist in the world of the text are yeastless, awful, flat bread as opposed to desirable, fluffy, yeasted bread.

    I understand the religious question that developed later, but it can't be answered by reference to the text; it has to be answered by modern considerations such as "well, we eat the unleavened bread to commemorate the hardship our ancestors suffered, so we should stick to bread that hasn't been leavened by any means ancient or modern" or a view of what inconveniences your congregation is and isn't willing to tolerate before they abandon you for someone more permissive, etc.

  29. J. W. Brewer said,

    November 11, 2014 @ 3:34 pm

    The unleavened/leavened parallelism of the English translations may not track the Hebrew but it does track the Septuagint Greek, which is very ancient (circa 200 BCE?), where e.g. in Ex. 12:15 ἄζυμα is contrasted with ζύμην (both I think in the accusative). On the other hand the Vulgate simply adopts "azyma" from the Greek as a transliterated technical loanword, but uses "fermentum" for the contrasting chametz/zyme/leaven.

    Perhaps in English "leaven" has taken on a more restricted meaning, at least over time, insofar as it seems (by my intuitions, not checked with actual corpus research) highly unidiomatic to use it for e.g. brewer's yeast or the yeasts used by winemakers or any of the other things used (whether in ancient times or more recently) to promote other sorts of fermentation processes outside of a bread/baking context, although I take it chametz/zyme/fermentum could probably all be used to describe yeasts used to produce beer or wine (beer/whiskey/etc are not kosher for Passover precisely because they are derived from "leavened" grain). That narrowing ("something that promotes a fermentation-like process only in the specific context of making bread and perhaps similar baked goods") seems at least as noteworthy as the arguable broadening to include non-yeast-based chemical leavening agents.

  30. Rodger C said,

    November 12, 2014 @ 7:53 am

    A very late comment, but it occurs to me suddenly that the odd usage of "unleavened" that was cited in the post could be explained this way: Most people nowadays know the word "leavened" only, or mainly, in the phrase "unleavened bread," and most people seldom see bread that isn't leavened, so they may have a vague notion that "unleavened bread" is bread that has been subjected to a process of unleavening.

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