Photo by Jakob Rosen on Unsplash.
Coloradans can personalize many of the state’s 218 license plates at an additional cost of $60 on top of regular fees. Personalized license plate renewal can cost between $25 and $75, and can be completed online or at a county motor vehicle office.
— Colorado Department of Motor Vehicles
Last year, Colorado drivers kept the Division of Motor Vehicles busy reviewing personalized license plate applications in 2023. Vanity plate applications. The DMV approved over 60,000 ‘vanity plate’ applications in 2023, almost doubling the number approved in 2022.
While thousands of applications were approved… plenty were rejected for being “foul, lewd or rude requests”. In total, the DMV reviewed and rejected over 1,000 personalized license plate configuration requests in 2023. So, like, one out of every 60 requests.
Including mine.
DMV has a list of words and acronyms that are automatically prohibited. The list is 566 pages long. Clearly, Colorado drivers have come up with a lot of lewd requests over the years.
The list of applications that were refused in 2023 is 32 pages long. Rejected requests for license plate configurations, such as “GYATTT,” “GTJIGGY” and “OMGWTF”, were added to the ‘offensive-omit list’.
To be totally honest, most of the phrases or acronyms or abbreviations listed as ‘offensive-omit’ meant absolutely nothing to me. Maybe I’m out of touch? But I have to say, whoever the DMV has hired to review vanity plate requests must have an encyclopedic knowledge of lewd phrases to correctly identify some of those rejected requests.
Like, one of the applications last year was requesting a license plate that said: “TRIM”.
If I worked for DMV, I would assume this applicant was a barber?
Turns out, “Trimming” is slang for “making out”, among certain folks who live along the Gulf Coast.
Is “making out” lewd? I guess so. Been so long, I can’t remember exactly what it entails.
Another illegal application asked for a plate reading: “SAAB”.
We might assume this was intended to be attached to a SAAB automobile, although most people can identify a SAAB from a mile away. (Most likely, when the car is sitting in a junk yard.) But we might be making a wrong assumption. Turns out, there are a couple of nasty meanings to the particular letter arrangement, which I shall avoid sharing. (For the helplessly curious, see the Urban Dictionary.)
As you might guess, in order to make sense of the DMV’s 566-page list of naughty license plate requests, I had to spend a lot of time perusing the Urban Dictionary.
I had applied for a vanity plate that read: “LOUS”.
As in “This is Lou’s automobile”. (I thought it would be too confusing to have “LOUISS”. Plus, that arrangement actually does look lewd, for some reason.)
When my application was rejected — for reasons I could not understand — I went straight to the Urban Dictionary and found this definition:
Lou’s are kindest people — they will always be there for you no matter the situation. Lou’s are intelligent beyond their years and will always offer help and their intelligent to those around them. Loving and caring Lou’s will always be there to pick you up and make you smile with brilliant hugs. Lou’s are the best people.
Which is exactly the definition I expected the DMV to embrace.
But apparently, the DMV thought I meant something totally obscene.
Another definition from the Urban Dictionary:
A Lou is a type of person who will do anything for [expletive deleted]. This person is always a pig. A Lou might text people asking for quickies, but rewording it by saying “15 minutes?”. Beware of Lou’s…
Just to be clear, I have never, ever, texted anyone asking for a quickie.
Especially, not anyone who works for the DMV.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.