Once every day, a “Special Plates Review Committee” sits down to ponder new requests for Ohio vanity license plates. The group of seven includes folks ranging from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles’ chief dealer of licensing to the department’s customer service assistants.

If there isn’t a consensus, the offending plate is pushed up the ladder for Top Men to make a final call. For all the innocuous “ILUVCATS” that find happy homes on beige mini-vans, there is also a pile of rejections. The denials include those featuring vulgarities, threatening remarks, racist language, and sexual references, as well as acronyms and abbreviations that might be harder for the untrained eye to decipher.

Happily, sleazeball motorists are not exactly taking over our roads. From January through May, the Special Plates Review Committee had rejected 57 out of an astounding 194,000 vanity plate submissions, according to documents provided by the Ohio Department of Public Safety. (18 more were rejected between May and July.) Outcasts range from the predictably prurient (ORGZM, ICUM1ST), to expressions of a sporting bent (BCSSUX), to the pathetically lame (1BADSOB, FKNAWSM), to the-why-would-you-ever-want-that (EATSHHT), to the definitely clever yet just as definitely forbidden (CAPSAHO).

If you think you can slide a naughty reference by the board, rest assured it won’t work. BMV spokeswoman Lindsey Bohrer says the group digs into the interwebs to research the more inscrutable entries.

“When reviewing, we primarily use the internet, which gives us access to various language websites, including sites for urban slang,” she says. “There is a file that is kept of all the words we have denied in the past, which we add to each day, so the combinations in the file are automatically blocked.”

For example, “NEONFTW” was among the vetoed applications. While the plate was likely intended to convey “Neon, for the Win” to uninterested fellow drivers, “FTW” can also mean “Fuck the World,” so it earned the red X. In fact, the BMV references no higher an authority than Urban Dictionary in clarifying why the plate was rejected. And they really are careful with profanity over there: They even censored the naughty word as “F*ck” in their e-mail.

Below, the complete list of rejected plates so far in 2011.

OHELL,
NGASPLS,
MPGSUX,
HAULSAZ,
FOKFUNY,
FKNAWSM,
FKGAS,
FCKWME,
1BPISC,
WYTTRSH,
WTF1,
WOPMNEY,
STLRSUQ,
STEWGOT,
SMARTAZ,
RICHFKR,
RFNPL8,
PORNER1,
ORGZM,
OMGBFD,
NGASPLZ,
NEONFTW,
MOMSMLK,
LILSOB,
KILLNEM,
ITSTITS,
ISHOOTU,
IKUM1ST,
ICUM1ST,
HOLESHT,
HIYELLW,
H8TERS,
FUPAME,
FUKFUNY,
FTMFWB,
FOURPLA,
FNDODGE,
FKNMINI,
FCKNLOW,
EFNAWSM,
EFFEMUP,
EATSHHT,
DOOKIE1,
CUUUCH,
CAPSAHO,
BENZFTW,
BCSSUX,
BAMFTA,
BAADAZZ,
B4D4SS,
ASSN9,
4VAJJ,
4CLIMAX,
2FNHOT,
1BATTOP,
1BADSOB,
FKGAS,
FNFASST,
FUBLU,
BTCH1,
COONIN,
DIUKN,
DMBFN46,
ABADSOB,
S2GOTZ,
STUGOTZ,
HAULSAZ,
IFARTED,
IH8NCAA,
IMRFBCH,
MIGKLR,
MSTNKLR,
NOFARTN,
ZMB3KLR

This article appears in Jul 27 – Aug 2, 2011.

Vince Grzegorek has been with Scene since 2007 and editor-in-chief since 2012. He previously worked at Discount Drug Mart and Texas Roadhouse.

5 replies on “The Reject Pile”

  1. About twenty years ago, OHIO Magazine ran a list of roughly 200 “banned words and phrases” that were forbidden on the blue-and-white “Heart of it all” plates…that’s right…just 200…and now there are dozens banned EACH YEAR? Ridiculous. Are people in Ohio getting stupider…or is the BMV getting more persnickety?

    I can understand why they might ban KKK or H8MICH, but I am a diehard supporter of a non-Ohio MLB team and when I asked for a six-letter vanity plate with FAN included, it was “No dice.” Why? Because…FAN refers to the rear end of the human anatomy…the “fanny”…go figure.

    Yet, for years afterward, all over Northeast Ohio, I saw letter-number combinations beginning with KIK and KYK. That’s the pretzel logic of Columbus, and our wonderful BMV, folks.

  2. I want to know why this pack of bozos can ban FTW as “F*ck the world” but think it’s okay for the white panel van that I see around my neighborhood with the plate LURES2. I’m trusting enough to assume the van owner didn’t mean to be creepy but wonder why no BMV hackles were raised.

  3. I reckon I was confused when them there BMV-ians banned my applications for “WHTHOOD”, “NDEBKDR”, and “ALKY4LF”.

  4. They don’t allow h8 to be included either in a plate but if you put a space between the two is gets through. If you want something bad enough you can find away to outsmart them:-D

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