“Dash cams, as reported in Animal, have become ubiquitous in today’s Russia, where road hazards range from ‘insane gridlock’ to ‘large, lawless areas’ habited by ‘police with a penchant for extortion and deeply frustrated drivers who want to smash your face,’ and where courts rarely award damages without video evidence. A large percentage of Russian car crashes are thus captured on video and aggregated on a devoted LiveJournal page that gets more than four million views per month. The car-crash video corpus is a gold mine of piquant Russian slang, from the derogatory potsient—a hybrid of ‘[hospital] patient’ and ‘putz,’ used to denote crash victims—to the honorific zhelezobetonnoe ochkko—anus of concrete—for drivers who navigate deadly situations without losing their cool.”

- A Meteor in the Russian Sky by Elif Batuman

41 Notes/ Hide

  1. graphicsensibility reblogged this from millionsmillions and added:
    Somewhere in the back of my mind I know.
  2. chaokai60 reblogged this from millionsmillions
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  6. lindamatshiqi reblogged this from millionsmillions and added:
    hahaha…
  7. lawonthefly reblogged this from maudnewton and added:
    Having spent time in Russia, I can see how a dash cam makes sense.
  8. wewantnothing reblogged this from maudnewton
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  11. garyjmatthews reblogged this from millionsmillions and added:
    Who ever said crazy wasn’t a global thing.
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  15. millionsmillions posted this