The list keeps expanding. One expansion came when it was discovered that some plates were only ‘naughty’ when seen in a rear-view mirror.
Perhaps it started out as 59PWNDU and only got to 69 due to inflation.
This reminds me of a radio morning show where they played a game of “Tell your spouse an embarrassing secret you’ve been holding back” (I don’t recall the actual name). A man called his wife to admit that he helped their son get a tattoo of a phrase he always used when he won a video game: “Pay me bitch!” She was not amused.
Rodman wasn’t allowed to have 69?
The DVLA publishes a list of banned combinations each year. I wonder who compiles it?
This is from 2020:
AS20 HOL GO20 HEL BS20 TRD EU20 BAD GB20 GUN NO20 ARM PE20 RVT BO20 OCK MU20 DER NO20 JOB TO20 SRR MY20 MUF GB20 FKD BU20 GRD MU20 GER
You may not be aware that UK plates follow a specific pattern:
The first two letters show where the car was first registered. The two numbers show the age (which is why those in the list are all 20) and the last letters are random.
I have a Tennessee license plate with 69 included. It’s not a vanity plate. Yesterday my 14 year old grandson noticed the 69 on the plate and made a comment about it. But, it was about a rapper that uses the number in his name. I didn’t mention where the rapper probably got 69 from.
Eventually, that kid is going to get a huge shock when he realizes he once talked about oral sex with his granma!.
Nice.
I’ve seen a pink Jeep with “GRRL POWER” stickers and Virginia tag RUB1OUT. I’m 100% sure DMV would have blocked that if they’d thought about it. Actually surprised the “rub out” part didn’t get it noticed even without the sexual reference!
A while back I came across a massive PDF that resulted from a public records request of denied vanity plate applications, covering all 50 state DMVs. A lot of the banned plates were incredibly innocuous, or maybe I am just not getting the dirty jokes involved. Rejected plates included:
AFOOT
ACES
ABNORML
ALCHEMY
ALRIGHT
ALICE
ARCHIE
AOKAYE
AUTISM
AVIATOR
HEYJUDE
HIJINX
INSPIRE
JELLO
JTKIRK
KAYAKER
L8AGAIN
PRAXIS
QTRBACK
QUAKER
SHOPGRL
SHOEGRL
TOUCAN
UNMOVED
VRMONTR
Sorry no source for this, but here’s a similar PDF list for just Nebraska. Lots of offensive stuff, but also lots of WTF denials.
That reminds me that I have had business dealings with a somewhat sour individual whose last name is “Assenbacher.” I can forgive him his somewhat unpleasant personality; I can’t imagine the grief he must have gotten in school with that name. “Hey, Ass in Back!”
I suppose some of this can be regional, too. When I lived in Texas a loooong time ago, one of my friends tried to get vanity plates, a simple AMF, and was denied. (For those of you that don’t speak Texican, that’s “Adios, Mother F****r”.) Currently, here in Hawai’i, my next door neighbor, a very religious fellow has that as his vanity plate.
That just makes me think of the manufacturer of bowling alley equipment.
Is it possible that those were rejected, not for inappropriateness, but just because someone else already had them?
That seems very plausible, but as it happens, I’ve found the source of my list: (PDF) https://www.governmentattic.org/7docs/DC-BannedPlates_2012.pdf
That source (which turns out to be just the District of Columbia, not the whole nation) contains the D.C. DMV’s response to the FOIA request, referencing “A copy of the list of prohibited personalized license plates: The Forbidden Tag List. enclosed, 68 pages.” So yeah, definitely prohibited and forbidden, who knows why.
Unrelated: The State of Washington’s DMV responded (PDF) to a request by providing correspondence from citizens appealing their plate application rejections. Some of these are a little hard to take seriously: the person who wants “SHGNWGN” (“Shaggin’ Wagon”) and says it’s about Scooby Doo; the person who wanted “RNOVAU” (“Run Over You”) claiming it’s about his name’s initial R combined with “Nova University”, his club of Nova car afficionados; the person who wanted “FMLYJLZ” (“Family Jewels”) because her name is Jules and she loves her family, etc. etc.
ETA the person who claims “FUBAR” stands for “Fun, Unique, Beautiful and Rare.” What a fun job it must be, fielding this kind of correspondence, let alone screening the plate applications themselves.
I recall a case from here in Virginia:
A U.S. District Court judge in Alexandria has ruled that the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles had no right to revoke a Loudoun County man’s personalized license plates that read “GOVT SUX.”…
How tall would his partner have to be make this work?
I always liked this rejected plate:
There are a few of these that I can’t figure out what would be offensive:
|EU20 BAD| You Bad?
|NO20 JOB| No job? Nose job?
|BO20 OCK| I have no idea what this even means
|NO20 ARM| No arm?