The great state of North Carolina recently began issuing license plates beginning with the letters W, T and F. Reasonable, grown-up adults who received these plate numbers at first didn't even bat an eye at the text-slang exclamation adorning their license plates. Until their children started giggling. AFP reports that one North Carolinan with the WTF plates "wasn't hip to the Internet-age significance of her new license plate," but "developed this real self-consciousness" after catching her grandchildren laughing at the hilarity of it all. Rather than enjoying a good ROTFL, this elementary school teacher just did what everyone else in elementary school does when kids mock them on the playground: run crying to the state government. Thanks to one plateholder's stunning lack of a sense of humor, the state of North Carolina is now recalling all of the 9,999 "WTF plates" issued. Including WTF-5505 which was being used by the DMV as a media prop for stories about the state's switch from blue plate lettering to red. The NC DMV has pledged to thoroughly vet every future license plate combination to weed out any inappropriate text-message acronyms (at taxpayer expense). Note to DMV: AYSOS?
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That would happen in my Midwestern county as well as the little old ladies at the BMV wouldn’t catch that either.
And I agree, kids first! ;)
This license plate rocks!
While it is all sorts of fun to overreact and make fun of people in simplistic ways (keeping with TTAC standards), the state has simply offered to replace for free the plates of any person who is offended by the acronymn. And while TTAC has much fun being as R rated as possible, there are people who believe in standards of acceptable public behavior and might in fact be offended by these plates.
LOL! Here are some favorites. Miata kids vanity plate with the symbol “heart”2BSEXE. Mercedes plate DLRBILL. BMW 3 series plate FUTRCFO. Toyota Corola with gold plated emblems 24CARAT. Pink Corvette RACRBOY. Cant wait to see ROFLMAO which is available in California if anyones interested. XD
Do a Google Image Search for “A55-RGY.” It’s a Lincoln LS in Florida. The orange in the middle forms the “O”.
Dude who has it is probably 85 years old and blissfully unaware…
Saw an older gentleman in a Viper with the plates “PRDTOR”. Must have had an inverted member. Couldn’t stop laughing for quite a while.
I miss George Carlin.
Where, pray tell, are the states supposed to draw this line? I mean, can’t almost anything seem dirty if you try hard enough (to be childish)?
Please government, save us from the innuendo!
So, it’s ok to see violence on TV and hawk ten-teaspoons-of-sugar-per-can cola, but we can’t have kids see three letters that refer to a slang curseword? Words that kids already know and probably have been using since the age of five?
Pity George Carlin passed away, I’m sure he’d have something to say on this.
Thom,
I don’t think the demogrpahics of “People who would be offended by what WTF stands for” and “People who know what WTF stands for” intersect much, except that the first group probably has spawned some members of the second.
RF: beat me to the Carlin reference…
I remember seeing both the WTF and WTH plates here in NC. I narrowly missed having one unfortunately. I was the victim of the ‘changeover’ as I had gotten a new plate on my now 11+ year old 1995 S10 when I bought it new. I was forced to the new ugly red letter plates. I thought it was great personally…would have been fantastically easy to remember for me, after having had a plate before that read “HYA-xx99” which I had easily memorized. Now I have no clue what mine is: VWY or something that has no easy to remember acronym.
The Subaru still rolls with my infamous OHNO3S! plate. I still have folks ask me if it has something to do with ‘no threes’.
-Biggly
“IB6 UB9” beats all.
the plate graces a 2000 Lincoln registered to Pygmy Computer Systems, a Miami company specializing in portable computing devices. Mark Geigel, Pygmy’s president and driver of the gold A55RGY-mobile, said in an e-mail interview that he did not think his “stock issue plate” was such a big deal.
I think we can safely rule out the 85 years old and blissfully unaware aspects.
And while TTAC has much fun being as R rated as possible, there are people who believe in standards of acceptable public behavior and might in fact be offended by these plates.
Wow…
Anyway, here in the Netherlands there are some combinations that won’t be issued, however we have very boring plates (yellow, black letters), issued completely randomly with every new car, that cannot (for now) be requested but are a reflection of the date when the license plate was issued. It always used to be a combination of 2 letters/figures – 2 figures/letters – 2 letters/figures but now there are 3 letters! All the other combinations were exhausted.
Some things like NSB (abbreviation for a movement that collaborated with Z Zjermans in WW2) are banned, mostly politically incorrect things are banned…Quite boring really…
I FL a year or two ago, a person was made to return a custom plate that read “MILF”. I’m not even sure how that can be construed as an insult (if anything, it’s kind of flattering :) ). Too much PC just strips character, and makes us all into a GAP ad.
There is a woman in my home town, and a friend of my grandmothers, that has the plate “HOOKER”. Her last name is Hooker, and she is elderly. She gets a lot of dirty looks and complaints.
She loves it….
Several years ago, they began banning insensitive acronyms from plates and pulling existign plates that contained these acronyms. Get real. The funny part was most of the racial epithets were owned by people of that race. One example that I still remember was #1 WOP, owned by an Italian immigrant, who wasn’t too happy when they took her personallized license plates.
Here in the US it’s anything remotely referring to profanity or innuendo. In Europe it’s anything referring to fascism (or communism). For example, in Germany it’s illegal to name your child “Hitler” or “Stalin.” It may in fact be illegal to name your kid “Adolf.”
Different variations, same theme. Everyone’s got to get their panties in a bundle over something.
A guy I know once had a tag containing the sequence ‘666’. On more than one occasion as he pulled into a gas station, the attendant came running/screaming/waving out of his glass house shouting for him to ‘git’ out of here. They weren’t about to service his satan-mobile there.
My response to this topic would be adequately summed by the first three letters of the recalled license plates.
Different strokes for different folks.