50 Keywords: The Secret Life of English

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. This anecdote reveals the cultural baggage underlying the very common words that we use every day. The highly distinguished linguist Anna Wierzbicka here proposes to create a lexicon of 50 common English words, and to unpack their meaning in order to show their hidden assumptions and cultural history. Intended explicitly as a sequel of sorts to the cultural critic Raymond Williams' classic KEYWORDS, Wierzbicka's book focuses in particular on words that originate directly from Anglo culture, which don't have exact equivalents in other languages. The word 'frustration', for example, has no such equivalent in other languages, and Wierzbicka explains how and why it is tied to our culture's emphasis on goals, plans, and achievement -- values that other cultures may not share. Similarly the word 'personal' as in 'may I ask a personal question?' or 'personal space' is hard for non-Anglos to understand if they don't understand how we delineate what is private and what is public. Among other words discussed: efficiency, emotion; freedom, happy, Okay, opportunity, reasonable, self, tolerance, and work.