I recently bought a new car and my husband and I are having a minor disagreement about my idea for a vanity plate. My new car is a PT Cruiser – the color is Cool Vanilla and it has flames in a stripe down the side. My idea for a vanity plate is HOT VNLA. Now, I think of “hot vanilla” as a pun on both “hot chocolate” and on the color of the car – Cool Vanilla, remember, with flames. I think it’s kind of clever – not Oscar-Wilde-clever, or even Unca-Cecil-clever, but vanity-plate-clever. Certainly cleverer than TAMYZ PT.
My husband thinks it will be taken as a sexual innuendo – the ‘Hot’ part – or, worse, as a racial innuendo – that I’d be driving around town proclaiming myself not just a Sexy Chick, but a Sexy White Chick.
Now, I honestly didn’t think of a sexual connotation for “Hot,” I was just thinking about the flames. Nor did the racial thing cross my mind. But I’m often clueless about things like this. On the other hand, my husband is extremely conservative and doesn’t have a pun-ny bone in his body. So it’s kind of difficult to tell whether he’s just being stuffy, or I’m just being oblivious.
So, if you saw a vanilla-colored (and the color is a very obvious vanilla shade – not White or Off-White or Yellow, but a very creamy shade of Cream) with red flames (and the flames are very noticable, they aren’t a tiny pinstripe, but a very bold 3-inch wide stripe of red flames running all the way down both sides of the car) with vanity plates reading HOT VNLA would you get the joke? Or would you just think I was making some sort of sexual or racial statement?
Well, it’s just that it’s so unnecessary to proclaim myself a Sexy White Chick, when it’s so obvious to everyone who’ll see me driving around that I am a Sexy White Chick.
I guess that’s the thing I’m really worried about, seriously. It seems unbecoming for a respectable woman of a certain age to be driving around with a flirty license plate like a 16 year old girl. Even worse if it’s a racially divisive flirty license plate.
So, come on folks, help me out – is it really a flirty license plate, or just a pun on the paint job?
It would never, ever occur to me that HOT VNLA was a comment on the paint job. I would assume the HOT part meant sexy, and frankly, the first thing I thought when I saw VNLA was vulva. I know it doesn’t fit the letters, but that’s where my mind went with the HOT.
I’m far from a square, but I think you’re gonna give the wrong impression with HOT VNLA.
Recall there was a white rapper stage-named “Vanilla Ice” who was popular for a mercifully brief time a few years ago. Vanilla is definitely a slang racial term in addition to its other uses.
The car may look very vanilla-colored to you while it’s brand new and clean, but for most of its life to most onlookers it’ll simply be offwhite or light tan or white-but-needs-a-carwash.
When I see “hot” on a license plate I think of sexy unless the car is a Corvette or somesuch where the car itself might be the object of “hot”. And no, a PT cruiser, underpowered miniwagon that it is, is definitely NOT a hot car. No way, no how.
If you want a plate to to accentuate the car, try BURN N PT or FLAMN PT or PT FLAMR or even WHIT HOT.
Only someone who has shopped for a PT is going to know the name of that paint color, so you are pitching your joke to a very small segment of the people who see the plate. Some words are easy to see when you pluck out a few letters, and I don’t think vanilla is one of them. I do word puzzles, and I don’t think I would have quickly gotten vanilla from VNLA if you hadn’t told me. VNIL would have been a bit clearer. HOT is clear, but it could be talking about the car or the driver. IMHO, that is.
Thanks everyone. Actually, this is what I wanted to hear – if it’s a dumb idea I want to know it before I head out to the shopping center and possibly get my car keyed or something.
Total hijack, but I had to laugh when I saw the post - being originally from Virginia, my husband laughed the first few times he came to see me and said that Virginia has more vanity plates on cars than any other state he’s ever seen. And I never realized it, but the vanity plates ARE extremely popular compared to NYS or OH.
I suppose I might get the joke, but the first thing I thought of when I saw “HOT VNLA” in this post was “Sexy white chick”.
And as many Dopers know, I’m not exactly conservative.
As Odinoneeye said, though, there’s nothing inherently wrong with declaring yourself a sexy white chick. Just keep in mind that someone may take it the wrong way.
HOT on the liscense plate would make me think it was meant to be sexy and I would not get that VNLA referred to the paint even if I figured out it meant Vanilla.
Vanity plates can be tricky so you are wise to think it through. Once when I had a red FIAT spider my husband was all hot to trot to put a vanity plate on it that said:
BIGRED :rolleyes:
To me it was pronounced as all one word (Beh-gred) like a really bad female name. We decided to forgo the vanity plate but forever called the car Bigred.
Hijack: If I ever became inclined to get a vanity plate (not overly likely), I’ve considered that it might be cool to get one with a SDMB reference - HI OPAL comes to mind. Plus, it would be super-cool to apply at the Ohio BMV and find that it was already taken!
May I also point out that the person behind you on the road who may see your HOT VNLA license will not be able to see the flames painted on the sides of your car?
I just think it’s kind of lame. No offense. I got what “VNLA” meant, but I would never get the reference to your car’s paint job. And though I think PT Cruisers are cute as heck, a vanilla-colored PT Cruiser isn’t exactly a Jaguar, you know?
I do, however, like the “NOTSLUT” idea. Go with that one.
(Replace Jaguar with another reference to expensive cars as appropriate. I don’t know a thing about the subject.)
Well, I thank you all, and my husband really thanks you all. He said that, being as it’s my car, I could, of course, have any license plate on it I wanted. However, if I’d gone with that idea he wouldn’t ever be able to drive it – and it’s already asking a lot of him to occasionally drive a car with flames on it. keep in mind that his car is a Passatt – a plain, gray Passatt.
Anyway, I think I’ll take kevja’s suggestion and just bag the whole vanity-plate idea. I could have had TAMYZ PT, which my husband actually liked, or CRUIS3N, but it seems that every Cruiser you see has some variation on those ideas. Anyway, it’s a pretty eye catching car anyway, and will be even more so once my new rims (Smoothies with chrome Baby Moon hubcaps – like these yelloe ones, but powder-coated red to match the flames) are mounted. So I think I’ll just leave it alone.
