Offensive Number Plates? Snot Funny

Those stout defenders of fragile public sensibilities, the DVLA, have once again leapt into action to defend us from the shocking and the obscene.

In the past, the issuing authority has withheld or withdrawn car registrations which may appear to convey an offensive meaning. Despite the fact that UK vehicle registrations are actually sequences of coded characters which, although they contain information about the bearer vehicle, have no inherent semantic content, a number of registrations have been "banned" in this way. When one considers the purely functional nature of the system as devised, it becomes clear that any offensive aspect to a UK number plate must surely be in the eye of the beholder.

That said, I do not dismiss out of hand the actions of DVLA in such cases. There are certain UK number plates which do contain strings of characters which visually resemble words to most onlookers. At the same time, there are certain people who might deliberately use such number plates in a context where the coincidental meaning is emphasised and may, therefore, cause offence. For example there are certain combinations which have been withdrawn or withheld because they resemble words which may be used in a racist context. Clearly, if, for example, a member of an extreme nationalist/racist group were to affix such a number to a vehicle which was then used for political campaigning, it would benefit no one and would probably cause trouble.

On the other hand, when a range of registrations is withdrawn from circulation in Scotland because some people consider that the string "SN07" resembles the word "snot"... well, one wonders whether we are being defended a little too enthusiastically. In the great scheme of things, how much civil unrest is a "snot" number plate going to cause?

Rumour has it that the forthcoming SN08 registrations may also be withheld due to a passing resemblance to the word "snob". That would seem to be a bit of absurdly reactionary anticipation: especially when one considers that registrations such as ORG 45M, PEN 15 and DO51 COW have been in circulation for some time without the decay of society being noticeably hastened.