Take it from me, there’s nothing like a job well done. Except the quiet enveloping darkness at the bottom of a bottle of Jim Beam after a job done any way at all.
Stephen Colbert
In New Girl episode 1.03, our down and out character Nick inches punches a standee of Steve and Bree, whose wedding Nick and cast are attending. We never even meet Steve, but he needs to pay the price for Nick’s misfortune, and for failing to comp an open bar at his wedding in spite of having a rich father. What a loser.
Good episode of this promising new show BTW.
Steves are everywhere. I used to be one too. Still am I suppose. The fact that I started going by my middle name (not Steve) instead of my given name, Stephen (with a “ph” of course), doesn’t change what my parents gave me and what still appears on my drivers license.
In 7th grade there were three boys named Steven/Stephen/Steve in one of my classes. I thnk that is when I started feeling the sense that Steve’s are ubiquitous. It would appear to this Steve that in pop culture Steves are more ubiquitous than ever. There is a Steve in a new ATT commercial, whose wife says she should have married someone else, and who looks like a huge dork with bozo hair, horn-rimmed glasses, quivering voice, and a history of making bad decisions. I’ve noticed geeky Steves in beer commercials. The main character in the new film Ides of March is a Steve. Of course there is the great Stephen Colbert, who is maybe the best Steve of them all. Steve-O from the Jackass series. American Pie’s despicable, perverted Steve Stifler. Even Ke$ha has a song named Stephen, where she pines for our man who is too aloof, or just too stupid, to not go ahead get some of that.
My days as a Steve became numbered during my senior year in high school, when I decided that along with going away to college, that I was a serious geek that needed to break from the past. What better way to to do than to use a different name. Instantly I would have a new persona. The decision was cemented when I went away to college orientation and while standing in line, the guy in front of me turned around to introduce himself. He said “I’m Steve” or something to that effect and I replied that I was [my middle name] and that was that. Sure it took years (or never) for older acquaintances to make the switch, but the downside of this complexity is more than outweighed by the benefit of using a name that nobody else in the room ever has, and that yields compliments somewhat regularly. Nobody ever told me they like my name when it was Steve.
Having decided to abandon the name, there is no doubt I have a special relationship with it, and perhaps a sensitivity to noticing its appearance in the wild. From what I can see on ssn.gov baby names page, Steven/Stephen are not nearly as common used for babies as say “David” but I swear the frequency of it in pop culture has got to be close to the top of the list, and particularly common for geek/dork/laugh-at-me as opposed to laugh-with-me characters.
I can’t wait to use this forum to not only put the spotlight on the ubiquitous Steve, but to also be a Steve, dork or otherwise, for your mild amusement.
