Wierzbicka, AnnaGladkova, AnnaSadow, LaurenPeeters, BertMullan, Kerry2020-11-11978-981-329-979-5http://hdl.handle.net/1885/216031In 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 Englishapplication/pdfen-AU© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020SexSeksRussianEnglishNatural semantic metalanguage (NSM)PolysemyCross-cultural comparison202010.1007/978-981-32-9979-5_42020-07-06