Abstract
<jats:p>The article presents a comparative analysis of the Russian word poryadochnost’ (decency/integrity), considered as a linguocultural concept whose current meaning reflects the sociocultural and socio-political context of society and depends on the type of personality characteristic of a given historical period. A study of the evolution of the concept poryadochnost’ from 1921 to 2020, based on the data from the Russian National Corpus, has confirmed that its content functions as a sensitive indicator of sociocultural transformations: both the meaning of poryadochnost’ and its social role are historically determined. The semantic compression of the concept’s content observed in recent decades, and corroborated by the data from an associative experiment conducted by the author, points to a decline in the social relevance of this notion for broad segments of contemporary society and to its transformation from a universally binding norm into a marker of personal choice.</jats:p>