Structure of the headline "Olympics organizers scramble as furor over woke blasphemy grows."

Question

I've bumped into this newspaper's front page. I don't want to discuss politics but the structure of the sentence.

Olympics organizers scramble as furor over woke blasphemy grows.
—New York Post

I understand the general meaning of the sentence, but its structure feels like it's just a set of randomly ordered words. It feels to me like it's two sentences joined with the conjunction 'over' (in the meaning of 'while'). But in this case 'scramble as furor' makes no sense and feels like an idiom I don't get. It also would make sense if 'over' was a preposition, meaning the furor is over the (woke) blasphemy, but in this case the verb 'grows' is odd in the sentence structure. Or the 'grows' is suddenly a plural noun, and 'furor' is over the 'grows'.

So I would like a sort of a syntactic analysis in the explaining of the sentence . Again, no politics, I often experience this kind of frustration reading tweets and newspaper headlines all over the political spectre.

Answer 1

I've been editing news stories, designing newspaper pages and otherwise existing in this professional context for almost 25 years. This sentence (a "deck", strictly speaking) doesn't strike me as particularly unusual.

Olympics organizers scramble as furor over woke blasphemy grows

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First, the core of the sentence: its subject and its verb.

organizers scramble

In this usage, scramble is, as Merriam-Webster describes it, an intransitive verb meaning "to move with urgency or panic" (definition 1).

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But which organizers?

Olympics organizers scramble

Here, Olympics is an adjective describing the named organizers as those of the Paris Games.

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What are the circumstances causing these organizers to scramble?

Olympics organizers scramble as ______

The remainder of the sentence is an adverbial clause beginning with the subordinating conjunction as.

I'll discuss that clause separately.

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An adverbial clause, like any other dependent clause, contains its own subject and verb.

In this example, the clause (minus the conjunction as which introduced it) is:

furor over woke blasphemy grows

At its most basic, this clause says:

furor grows

where furor has the meaning of "an outburst of public excitement or indignation" (definition 4b).

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What kind of furor? It's about something in particular.

The writer describes the furor with a prepositional phrase, beginning with the preposition over:

furor over ______ grows

where over is "used as a function word to indicate the object of an expressed or implied occupation, activity, or concern" (entry 2, definition 7b).

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The remaining words, then, describe the reason for the controversy (the furor).

Some observers believe one scene of the Games' opening ceremony was disrespectful of their religious beliefs and history.

Put differently, they considered it a type of blasphemy:

furor over ______ blasphemy grows

where blasphemy is defined as "irreverence toward something considered sacred or inviolable" (definition 2).

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To call something blasphemous (blasphemous is the adjectival form of blasphemy, making use of the -ous suffix) is a serious charge.

What kind of blasphemy was it?

furor over woke blasphemy grows

You asked in your question to avoid politics, so I'll avoid attempting to add my own thoughts here.

Instead, I'll point you to an assortment of pieces attempting to define this adjective in the current American political context:

• https://www.politifact.com/article/2023/mar/07/what-does-it-mean-to-be-woke/
• https://www.kpbs.org/news/local/2022/03/11/lets-talk-about-it-what-does-woke-actually-mean
• https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879/stay-woke-wokeness-history-origin-evolution-controversy
• https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2023/what-does-woke-mean-definition/
• https://www.motherjones.com/mojo-wire/2022/12/desantis-ron-woke-florida-officials/

Presumably, this portion of the ceremony is being described as such because the performers were in drag.

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Now that we've explored the adverbial clause in detail, let's resume examining the entire sentence:

Olympics organizers scramble as furor over woke blasphemy grows

In other words:

• People thought part of a performance was "woke" and offensive to their religion ("woke blasphemy").
• That led to an increasing amount of criticism ("furor over woke blasphemy grows").
• That, in turn, caused the organizers of the Olympic Games (where the performance took place) to panic ("Olympics organizers scramble").

Answer 2

[Olympics organisers scramble] as [furor over woke blasphemy grows].

[Modifier + Subject + Predicate] + as + [Subject + Modifier + Predicate]

Grows is a verb and is the predicate of the subordinate clause. The preposition phrase over woke blasphemy modifies the subject furor.

Answer 3

Sample:

The parse is this:

• Olympics organisers scramble// as furor /over woke blasphemy/ grows.

• Paraphrase: Olympics organisers scramble at the same time that furor over woke blasphemy grows.

• as furor over woke blasphemy grows

Other similar examples of this pattern:

• as understanding about retrograde amnesia disappeared

• as happiness over winning the competition dissipated

So, we say emotions or opinions caused over something thing. Here, furor over some thing. One can also say: furor about something.

If you remove the as, there is a grammatical full sentence with subject verb and object:

• Furor over woke blasphemy grows.
• Happiness over the outcome disappeared.

as is a conjunction in the phrase. It means at the same time as. over is just a preposition that mean about or with regard to. It does join "organizers scramble" to "furor over woke blasphemy grows"

• He was angry over the situation that developed after the boxing match.

Answer 4

Prepositional phrase "over woke blasphemy" is an adjunct describing the basis for the "furor".

Compare:

Anger over vodka tax causes widespread revolt

over can sometimes be used as a synonym for "about".

Government officials scramble as anger over vodka tax spreads

Answer 5

I'm going to just build up the final headline from the simplest parts. I'll explain the evolving meaning as we go. Hopefully this will provide some visualization for the parse tree of the headline.

Olympics organisers scramble.

The Olympics organisers are engaging in quick and hurried action (for some reason).

Olympics organisers scramble as furor grows.

The organisers are scrambling at the same time that a furor (i.e., an angry outcry or feeling from the public) is growing ("grows" is the singular verb attached to the subject "furor"). Not only are they scrambling at the same time that the furor is getting worse, they are doing so in response to or because of that furor (this is implied by the clipped headline style that uses "as" to link two different statements).

Olympics organisers scramble as furor over blasphemy grows.

The furor they are responding to has to do with blasphemy (of some kind).

Olympics organisers scramble as furor over woke blasphemy grows.

The blasphemy has to do with wokeness. (I can't tell what this means from the headline alone. It could be that someone said "wokeness is bad" or "wokeness is good"

So the final meaning is: a furor is growing, regarding an instance of blasphemy about wokeness issues; in response to that, the Olympics organisers are engaged in hurried and confused activity.

And maybe the parse tree can be visualized like this:

[[Olympics [organisers]] scramble] as [[[furor] over [woke [blasphemy]]] grows].

Answer 6

The primary difficulty is that the newspaper layout has confused the parsing.

It has been printed to suggest:

Olympics organizers, scramble as furor over, woke blasphemy grows.

"scramble as furor over" is just a random collection of words, and "woke blasphemy grows" isn't much better.

That's why it feels like a string of random words: the provided parsing didn't work.

Then you had a second shot at it, as:

Olympics organizers scramble as furor over woke blasphemy grows.

Which was only marginally better, because you were still confused. But if the sentence was spoken, you wouldn't have had a problem, because it would be spoken as

Olympics organizers scramble, as furor over woke blasphemy grows.

Lacking the critical pause/comma after "scramble", the implied parsing is incorrect, and in this case you have to read all the way to the end of the sentence to resolve the ambiguity. And as you proceed through the sentence, your preferred/expected English parsing turns out to be worse and worse.

The "wrong" parsing is preferred because we prefer to attach the new word to the previous word when possible.

When you get to the end of the sentence, you start again, work out what it means, and it still feels wrong. But if feels wrong because it was unusual, and made more difficult by the print layout and lack of punctuation.

That's why we use punctuation.

Note: in a posting regarding how layout affects understanding, I've used a markup that preserves layout (it's called a 'code' markup). A bot on this site tried to change the markup, because "layout preservation" makes it impossible to wrap text like a newspaper headline does. Stack Exchange bots make the same kind of choices that newspaper editors do, and for the same reasons.