Reader’s Digest Bonus Read
112 july 2019
lingering. “I just wanted them safely
on the bus,” he says.
At the border crossing, as each
family cleared security, they were
moved to buses where blankets,
food, baby formula and water awaited
them. When all 10 buses were filled,
they left in a convoy for the Jordanian
border. It was 5 a.m. when the last
buses arrived in Jordan.When Nadera Al-Sukkar caught up
with the rescued White Helmets at an
undisclosed location in Jordan, she
realized the enormity of what had
been accomplished. In one exemplary
initiative, leaders from half a dozen
countries had set egos and differences
aside in a daring joint effort to save as
many White Helmets as was possible.Out of the approximately 800
White Helmets and family members
expected to escape, 422 crossed the
border that night.
“Canada played the leading role
in an absolutely extraordinary
international rescue operation that
came together in a frenetic three-
week period,” says Le Mesurier.
The rescuers had been rescued.Journalist Sally Armstrong and
photojournalist Peter Bregg travelled
to Jordan and Israel in August 2018.
This story is a cooperative venture
between Reader’s Digest and The
United Church Observer and also
appeared in The Observer’s January
2019 issue and on ucobserver.org.Why Aren’t Women ‘Charming’ Anymore?It makes sense that we associate certain adjectives more
with women (such as ‘maternal’) and some more with men (‘gallant’).
The surprising finding of a Stanford University study of language and
gender is how much our associations have changed over the past
century—and how much they haven’t. The researchers examined
databases of books, newspapers, and online sources to see which
adjectives were linked most often with which gender.
In the first half of the 20th century, adjectives such as ‘intelligent’
and ‘logical’ were associated more with men, but the words have
increasingly been associated with women since the 1960s. The most
common word used to describe women in the 1910s was ‘charming’,
but by the 1990s, it didn’t even make the top ten—but ‘tidy’ did.