“He’s a Steve” – The Onion gets hip to the furry jive

by Patch O'Furr

I’m crying at this breaking news from The Onion.

There’s something funny about how they wrote it.

Check this out:

Compare to the 2016 Dogpatch Press story A Newcomer’s Guide To Furry Terms and Customs.

They got “Steves” from there. Bet your fursuit. That’s the only place it appears like that.

What’s a Steve?

In-group slang is fun, especially when outsiders don’t get it.

A common furry word for outsiders is Normies, or less commonly heard these days, there’s the old-school nerd-word Mundanes.

A Newcomer’s Guide To Furry Terms and Customs invented “Steves” as another one. (It also lists Musclefurs, which is real — but very specific — so call it more evidence of referencing.)

This “guide” was written to set up a reader to believe a list of very real terms… salted with made-up bullshit that gets more and more silly until either they got the joke, or insiders can laugh at them for getting fooled. It was written out of annoyance at repetitive “what is a furry” bland Furries 101 media that uses terms nobody really uses any more. (This is a fan site, we can do satire or April Fools stories.)

After 7.5 years, it’s still one of the most currently searched stories on the site. It does admit being a prank at the end… but you have to read the whole thing. It still gets believing comments!

Arrkay The Bird of Culturally F’d says:

I think this is a moment of “grunge speak”. In the 90’s, a record company publicist pranked a NYT writer about Seattle’s grunge scene, making up a bunch of jargon which was uncritically published as true slang words.

Some of these made up slang words became actual slang, like Cob Nobbler.

Were The Onion’s writers in on the joke, or were they being Steves with a quick net search and a looming deadline? I can’t decide which one amuses me more.

Steve Gallaci and Steve Brule were unavailable to comment for this story.

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