“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
