50 Keywords: The Secret Life of English

by Anna Wierzbicka

In a famous incident in the pre-perestroika USSR, Phil Donahue asked Russian women on his TV show if sexualized images of women in the media were a problem there. A Russian woman notoriously replied 'there is no sex in the USSR.' That answer quickly became a catch phrase mocking communism, but what the woman had meant to say was that 'there is no sex, there is love' -- meaning that Russians did not have a word for 'sex' as an activity unto itself...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195392698
• ISBN13: 9780195392692
• Release Date: September 2099
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 320 Pages