‘Crushed it.’ Lucy Mangan does a great job with your new word submissions

Thank you, moneill, for submitting “crush it” – meaning “do exceptionally well” – as it gives me an excuse to quote one of my favourite moments from the second season of my favourite sitcom of recent years, Silicon Valley (Mike Judge’s latest and A Joy Forever). Richard and Jared, founder and business manager of the start up company Pied Piper, round whose trials and tribulations the series revolves, are trying to recruit more programmers.

“It says here on your resume,” says Jared, “that from 2010 to 2011 you ‘crushed it’?”

“That’s actually an old resume,” replies the programmer. “It should also read that I crushed it from 2013 to present.”

“So – are we to understand that you did not crush it in 2012?”

“There was a medical situation preventing me from crushing it to my usual standards. So I had to take some time off until I was able to crush it at 100%, at which point I resumed crushing it full-time.”

Perfect. It makes me long to apply for a proper job again so that I can use it.

I think I love Silicon Valley most for its veneration of the nerd. These are people who could look at WoodDoor41’s submission “triquadratic – a degree six polynomial” and understand it. Who would not be baffled even after an hour’s Googling as what any of those words mean in isolation or together. I once had a boyfriend who was doing a physics PhD and tried to explain such things to me. It was like looking into the mind of God. Thrilling, baffling and terrifying in equal parts.

These are people whose physattributes militate against any glorious physploits or physcapades. They are just humming brainfuls of numbers atop a handful of basic motor functions. That phys-umvirate was graciously supplied by new contributor (welcome, welcome) nh19812003 and is of course the product of merging “physical” and “attributes/escapades/exploits” respectively. Ugly contractions, to be sure, but I – working necessarily at the outer limits of the imagination that sits in the flabby, malcoordinated lump of fat and bone I call a body – presume that they come in very useful for the type of people who have them. More contraction, more time for action, as the saying could almost go.

I suppose you could say I have more of a “mumbod” – another contribution from moneill – formed along the same semantic and conceptual lines of the “dadbod” which became popular (only semantically speaking) over the summer. It’s the body you get after parenthood takes its toll, obviously. I seem to have had mine for 20 years, however, and my son is only four. Maybe I’m a medical marvel.

Or maybe I should get myself down the gym and start crushing it. Alas, there’s more chance of me understanding degree six polynomials. I wish you all a better, fitter fortnight til we meet again.