"There is no Sex in the Soviet Union": From Sex to Seks

Abstract

In Russian, the loan word seks is linked for many speakers with a famous episode from the pre-perestrojka period when in the course of one of the first Soviet–American tele-bridges a Russian respondent famously declared: “U nas seksa net …”, ‘there is no sex in the Soviet Union’. Focussing on seks as a loan word in Russian and exploring the meaning of its ubiquitous English counterpart in a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, this paper shows that the meaning of sex is a conceptual artefact of modern Anglo culture and that the differences between the two words can be illuminated through Minimal English