If something like that did come up, officials probably wouldn’t be LOL — laughing out loud.
The Patriot-News has a story about Pennsylvania’s license plates and the banning of “offensive acronyms,” like WTF or OMG. Naturally, parts of the article achieve near-perfect comedic scores.
In Pennsylvania, licensing officials use the online acronym dictionary, www.gaarde.org, to check letter combinations of issued plates and personalized plates, said Anita M. Wasko, director of the state’s bureau of motor vehicles.
They also don’t allow vowels in the center position of any three letter combination, excluding vanity tags. “We want to make sure we don’t have something out there that would cause issues,” Wasko said. “Something of a vulgar nature.” [...]
Licensing officials estimate they dish out about 15,000 vanity tags annually and all words are checked against a 9,600-word do-not-issue list along with English-Spanish, English-French and English-Italian dictionaries — in case anyone tries to slip any foreign-language obscenities by them — said Steve Tomassini, a manager in the bureau.
Bureau officials would not disclose what is on the list, but Wasko said it is continually updated. The bureau is also authorized to reject a license plate if they deem it offensive, she said. “People enjoy being able to purchase a vanity plate that reflects them,” Wasko said. “It’s important [to keep] the integrity of the program.”
Wow, that’s quite a lot of checking to make sure nobody is offended by a license plate. It’s worth it, though: Once the integrity of a license plate program goes downhill, the whole state is pretty much screwed.
OMG! PennDOT restricts Web lingo [The Patriot-News]
Image via Triborough
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