As the world looks forward to the Paris 2024 Olympics, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography’s manager Robert L. Fraser is peering into Canada’s athletic past.
Now in its 65th year, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB) contains more than 9,000 biographies of ordinary and famous Canadians. The bilingual resource, a joint effort by the University of Toronto and l’Université Laval, is the only one of its kind in Canada.
While hundreds of athletes will don the maple leaf at this summer’s Olympic games, it’s a far cry from a century ago when just a handful of Canadians crossed the Atlantic to compete in international competitions.
Fraser spoke to Arts & Science News about three relatively unknown Canadians whose stories still hold up a century later.
Velma Springstead (Track and Field)
Photo: Hamilton Sports Hall of Fame.
Velma Springstead was a member of the first Canadian women’s team to compete in international competition.
“Springstead is a name I’ve known my whole life,” says Fraser. “She's an interesting figure because she's a Hamiltonian, as am I, and I first heard about her when I was a kid from my dad. He saw her compete and spoke highly of her and her abilities as an athlete.
“It was important for him that a woman received the prominence she did based on her skills, hard work and discipline. She was working class, a secretary and, as Bruce Kidd wrote for the DCB, ‘an early favourite for a berth’ on the 1928 Canadian women’s Olympic team that went to Amsterdam. She died in 1927 from pneumonia before she could compete, but she was a big part of the breakthrough of women into sport.”
From left to right: Mollie Trinell, Grace Conacher and Velma Springstead in 1925 enroute to competition in London, England.
Photo: Bettmann/Getty Images.
Édouard Fabre (Marathon)
“One of the important things about Édouard Fabre is the Iroquois tie,” says Fraser.
Fabre, who was French-Canadian, was raised by an Iroquois family, the Montours, who lived across the street.
“Fabre qualified for the 1912 Stockholm Olympic Games, along with another Canadian James Duffy, finishing in 11th place, and later won the Boston Marathon.
“This biography comes from our Laval office. One of the things that distinguishes the DCB from other national biographical dictionaries is that our biographies are based on primary sources — these can be documents or interviews, and we give elaborate instructions to potential contributors. The primary source for this biography is Fabre’s daughter, Marcelle, who gave an interview in 2008.”
Edward (Ned) Hanlan (Rower)
Photo: William Williamson/Library and Archives Canada.
“Ned Hanlan was the first Canadian sports superstar. What's fascinating about him, I think, is that you see in the late 19th century, with the growth of Canadian society, the rise of a popular sports figure who attracts people from all classes and ethnicities. He embodies youthfulness, strength and skill. He’s an international figure and an ad person's dream of what an athlete should look like,” says Fraser.
“He represents the first major example of sports entering the marketplace, and the beginnings of something recreational becoming part of mass society with the spread of newspapers and photography. It's the beginning of that path to the popularity and proliferation of sports within society at large.
“What makes team sports and the Olympics possible is the ability to get from one place to another. In Hanlan’s era you couldn't do that very easily, but by the time you get to the 1920s, you can. Upon retiring in 1897, he continued coaching at the University of Toronto.”
What are the sounds of silence? With all due respect to Simon and Garfunkel, the most common answer is “crickets.” This noisy insect has somehow become synonymous with no sound at all.
This sense of the word crickets has yet to make the Oxford English Dictionary (though it surely will eventually). Still, it has plentiful coverage in Merriam-Webster, which added it to the dictionary in September 2023 with the definition “a conspicuous lack of response.” In discussing the term in a “Words We’re Watching” feature—which cites examples going back to the early 2000s—Merriam-Webster describes how crickets originally conveyed a sense of a rural setting:
“Crickets are often used by writers to convey atmosphere or to create a sense of place. That is, not the insects themselves, but rather the sound that crickets make. The chirping of crickets is the sound of nature on a summer night, and it has become a kind of cultural shorthand that indicates much with a single word: the setting is far from the city and far from people.”
The term seems to have evolved from senses indicating a rural setting—which is less noisy than the city by a lot—to any place or stretch of time quiet enough that, in theory, only the sound of crickets could be heard, as in this example from the 2007 novel Agnes and the Hitman: “There was a silence long enough to hear crickets in, and Agnes thought, If he makes some crack about me being not little, I’m gonna hit him again, and then he spoke.”
From there, crickets became a term for silence itself, one clear enough that it can stand alone as its own sentence, functioning as a sound(less) effect in writing. (Movies may have played a role in this: As Merriam-Webster notes, screenwriters have used it as “cinematic shorthand for quiet country locations” in scripts.)
Green’s Dictionary of Slang surprisingly has no examples until 2024, when it records a post on the social media platform Bluesky about a double standard in political coverage: “If Biden had called his wife Jill ‘Joan,’ how much ink would we see about how he’s old, senile + losing it? Yet The Other Guy ... crickets.”
This is typical of how the term is used. When a standup comedian’s joke bombs? Crickets. When a teacher baffles students? Crickets. When a band plays an unknown song instead of one of your favorites? Crickets. Crickets are the patron animal of silent awkwardness, a total non-reaction.
Crickets is a bit of a paradoxical term, as it means or indicates silence, but literally refers to some pretty noisy creatures. According to some sources, crickets can chirp as loudly as 100 decibels, which is about as loud as a snowmobile (a fact you’re likely all too aware of if you’ve ever tried to fall asleep with one trapped in your house). Even the word itself, borrowed from French, imitates the noise the insect makes. Some older, now-obscure expressions reference the boisterousness of the cricket: Lively as a cricket, for example, or merry as a cricket, were used in English as early as the early 1500s. An 1815 use by J. Mathers describes one happy and satisfied fellow: “I slept sound, ate and drank heartily, grew as merry as a cricket and as fat as a porker.”
This led to a sense of cricket meaning “a merry or lively person” from the 1600s on, which is still around in recent times, as seen in a Boston Globe use from 2002: “Her friend and fellow Wellesley Friends Meeting member ... described her as a ‘lively little cricket’.”
So, the cricket can signify merriment and noise or awkwardness and silence. That’s pretty good for a humble little insect.
The first edition of Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1828.
"It has been my aim in this work, now offered to my fellow citizens, to ascertain the true principles of the language, in its orthography and structure; to purify it from some palpable errors, and reduce the number of its anomalies, thus giving it more regularity and consistency of forms, both of words and sentences; and in this manner, to furnish a standard of our vernacular tongue," Webster wrote in the preface.
To immerse yourself in ye olde vernacular, simply look up any word in this digital edition of that 1818 dictionary. Times have changed, but apparently cats have not. Here is the definition of "cat" from the American Dictionary of the English Language of 1828:
"The domestic cat needs no description. It is a deceitful animal, and when enraged, extremely spiteful. It is kept in houses, chiefly for the purpose of catching rats and mice."
Previously:
• My cats go nuts for this YouTube channel
• Terrified feral cat learns to cuddle with his new very patient human (video)
• Mittens is the most relaxed cat I've seen
The innate immune protein C1q seems to have a thing for neurons. Already implicated in synaptic pruning by microglia, now it is reported to also slow down protein production in neurons of the aging mouse brain. In the June 24 Cell, researchers led by Nicole Scott-Hewitt and Beth Stevens at Boston Children’s Hospital reported that microglial C1q infiltrated neuronal ribosomes in year-old mice. In vitro, C1q and RNA formed liquid droplets, hinting that C1q sequesters transcripts in the brain in a process known as liquid-liquid phase separation. In a sign of this, year-old mice that lack C1q cranked out new proteins faster than did wild-type mice.
C1q from microglia can worm its way into the ribosomes of neurons.
C1q binds mRNA to form liquid droplets, implying it sequesters transcripts.
If mice lack C1q, their neurons make more protein.
“It was surprising to see C1q have such a profound effect on neuronal function,” Scott-Hewitt told Alzforum. She believes C1q may regulate translation in neurons of younger mice, but with age, these interactions turn more gel-like, clamping down on translation too much.
Other researchers praised the work. “This is an incredibly well-done and compelling study that convincingly demonstrates that a microglial-derived protein is taken up by neurons and modulates their function,” Kim Green at the University of California, Irvine, wrote to Alzforum. Borislav Dejanovic at the biotech Vigil Neuroscience in Watertown, Massachusetts, called the findings fascinating and unexpected. Because C1q is elevated in Alzheimer’s brain, its slowing of protein translation might contribute to neuronal dysfunction in that disease, Dejanovic speculated (comments below).
New Role for C1q. In aging mice, microglial C1q (red) gets into neurons, where it infiltrates ribosomes (top inset) and slows protein translation. Immunostaining conditions that include RNase (bottom inset) abolish this signal, showing that C1q’s association with ribosomes depends on RNA. [Courtesy of Scott-Hewitt et al., Cell.]
Stevens and others previously reported that C1q, in conjunction with other complement proteins such as C3, tags synapses for elimination during early brain development, and that this process is aberrantly reactivated in neurodegenerative disease models (Dec 2007 news; Aug 2013 news; Nov 2015 news). However, C1q also seemed to have effects that were independent of other complement proteins. Its expression climbs with age in both mouse and human brain, while those of other complement proteins do not. C1q knockout mice maintain sharper memories than wild-types as they age, and this is unrelated to C3 or synapse loss (Stephan et al., 2013). At the same time, C1q decorates synapses in the cortices of aged monkeys (Datta et al., 2020). What is it doing there?
To investigate, first author Scott-Hewitt isolated synaptosomes from wild-type mice and immunoprecipitated C1q from them, checking to see what else came along for the ride. Unexpectedly, C1q from year-old, but not 2-month-old mice, bound many ribosomal and RNA-binding proteins, suggesting the complement factor had taken up residence in neuronal ribosomes. Neurons rely on local translation at synapses to rapidly respond to stimuli.
The data puzzled Scott-Hewitt, because microglia make most of the C1q in the brain, and previous studies had detected little of it in neurons (Fonseca et al., 2017). To better visualize C1q in mouse brain sections, the authors fiddled with the immunostaining protocol, shortening the fixation time and replacing serum as a blocker of nonspecific binding with bovine serum albumin (BSA). Lo and behold, the new protocol revealed dense, punctate C1q staining throughout neuronal cell bodies and dendrites.
What explains the difference in staining? Further investigation implicated serum RNases in hiding the neuronal signal. Adding RNase to the BSA staining solution caused neuronal C1q to vanish, while adding an RNase inhibitor restored the signal even in the presence of serum. C1q’s interaction with ribosomes requires RNA, the authors concluded (image below).
Neuronal C1q Revealed. Under typical conditions using goat serum as a blocking agent (left), immunostaining for microglial C1q (purple) shows nothing in hippocampal or cortical neurons (green). When serum is replaced with BSA (right), C1q staining pops up throughout neurons. [Courtesy of Scott-Hewitt et al., Cell.]
Commenters were impressed by this methodology. “The technical optimization … is very elegant and could be potentially of great value for the field,” Nicola Fattorelli and Renzo Mancuso at VIB-Center for Molecular Neurology, Antwerp, Belgium, wrote to Alzforum (comment below).
Delving deeper, the authors mixed C1q and total RNA in vitro. The combo phase-separated, forming droplets that grew and fused over time. This happened with human C1q and human total RNA, as well, and with RNA preparations enriched for mRNA. C1q is made up of six heterotrimers, each with a stalk and a globular head. These bind via a collagen-like domain, forming one molecule with a thicker stalk and six globular heads (image below). Because the stalk contains an intrinsically disordered region predicted to be susceptible to liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS), the authors cleaved off this portion before combining it with RNA. The truncated C1q protein no longer formed droplets, confirming that the stalk was required for LLPS.
RNA Stalker. C1q’s stalk contains an intrinsically disordered region that can bind RNA and trigger liquid-liquid phase separation. [Courtesy of Scott-Hewitt et al., Cell.]
Given this interaction with RNA and RNA-binding proteins, might C1q affect protein translation? To test this, the authors tallied translation in wild-type and C1q knockout mice of different ages. Neurons in newborn and young adult knockouts churned out protein at the same rate as wild-types. By one year of age, however, C1q knockouts made about 30 percent more proteins than did wild types, and the mix was different.
For example, C1q knockouts upped production of mitochondrial proteins, at the expense of septins. Mitochondria are needed at synapses to provide energy for local translation. Meanwhile, septins participate in axon growth, spine formation, and synaptic vesicle release. Notably, both septins and C1q accumulate at synapses in mouse models of amyloidosis, while mitochondria are scarce (Györffy et al., 2020). Overall, the data strengthen the idea that removing C1q helps oppose Alzheimer’s-related changes at synapses.
When Scott-Hewitt and colleagues examined behavioral effects, they found that 6-week-old C1q knockouts remembered a tone associated with an electric shock for two days longer than did wild-types. It is unclear if this memory persistence in young mice is related to the enhanced memory of aging C1q knockouts.
Andrea Tenner at UC-Irvine noted that it will be important to repeat these behavioral experiments in older mice, when there is more C1q, and more droplets, in the brain. “Whether [C1q’s] RNA/RNP association has a positive or negative role in cognitive decline in disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease remains to be determined,” she wrote to Alzforum (comment below).
Serena Carra at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy, asked whether C1q might interact with the RNA-binding protein TDP-43, which has also been implicated in suppressing protein production via LLPS (Feb 2017 news; Apr 2022 news). She also wondered which neurons are affected. “Future studies should address the question of whether C1q is preferentially taken up by specific neuronal populations, and to what extent this may contribute to the spread of pathology,” Carra wrote (comment below).—Madolyn Bowman Rogers
Microglia Control Synapse Number in Multiple Disease States
In New Role for TDP-43, Scientists Say it Controls Protein Synthesis
Death by Goo: TDP-43 Gels Paralyze Proteasomes in Neurons
Paper Citations
Stephan AH, Madison DV, Mateos JM, Fraser DA, Lovelett EA, Coutellier L, Kim L, Tsai HH, Huang EJ, Rowitch DH, Berns DS, Tenner AJ, Shamloo M, Barres BA. A Dramatic Increase of C1q Protein in the CNS during Normal Aging. J Neurosci. 2013 Aug 14;33(33):13460-74. PubMed.
Fonseca MI, Chu SH, Hernandez MX, Fang MJ, Modarresi L, Selvan P, MacGregor GR, Tenner AJ. Cell-specific deletion of C1qa identifies microglia as the dominant source of C1q in mouse brain. J Neuroinflammation. 2017 Mar 6;14(1):48. PubMed.
Györffy BA, Tóth V, Török G, Gulyássy P, Kovács RÁ, Vadászi H, Micsonai A, Tóth ME, Sántha M, Homolya L, Drahos L, Juhász G, Kékesi KA, Kardos J. Synaptic mitochondrial dysfunction and septin accumulation are linked to complement-mediated synapse loss in an Alzheimer's disease animal model. Cell Mol Life Sci. 2020 Feb 7; PubMed.
