Sunday, February 17, 2013

Honorific of the Day: zhelezobetonnoe ochkko

From an article about the recent visit from outer space to the city of Chelyabinsk, and how the event was captured on numerous dashboard cameras:

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.

I'm going to guess that a more literal translation would require seven letters for the first word, but it sounds better in the original language in any case.

2 comments:

M. Bouffant said...

Sphincter?

bjkeefe said...

Nine letters, but even better!

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