It can be proved that words passing across linguistic barriers are often nothing more than acoustic images whose original meaning cannot necessarily be fully grasped and adopted; that is, mere strings of sounds whose meaning is subject not only to some semantic restriction or specialization, but also to more unpredictable semantic shifts. Cross-linguistic communication, in the absence of perfect bilingualism, is prone to errors, misunderstandings, or, perhaps, creative assignments of meaning triggered by context. Such ‘errors’ become apparent and amuse only when a cross-linguistic semantic comparison is undertaken. This paper attempts to reveal some interesting lexical relations occurring cross-linguistically, for which some psycholinguistic and/ or cultural explanations will be explored.