WTF... Abbreviation On Car Plates Makes Americans Blush

Thu Jun 26, 5:54 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - OMG! What is that on my car's license plate?
 
That's the question asked by 10,000 drivers who registered their vehicles in North Carolina last year and got registrations starting with "WTF."

Long just an innocuous combination of three letters, like OMG ("Oh my God!") WTF is now heavy with vulgar connotations: it is an oft-used email and mobile phone abbreviation that means "What the f***."

In North Carolina, WTF plates were issued to some 9,999 drivers last year, including elementary school teacher Mary Ann Hardee, who teaches computing and technology, the News and Observer newspaper reported earlier this month. "She wasn't hip to the Internet-age significance of her new license plate -- until she caught her teenage grandchildren giggling at it," Dan Kane, staff writer at the paper wrote.

Hardee, 60, told the paper she "developed this real self-consciousness" once she found out what her number plate meant in techno-shorthand. She petitioned the Department of Motor Vehicles, which ordered that she and everyone else who had a WTF number plate should receive new plates FOC -- free of charge.

This year, North Carolina registrations have three-letter combinations starting with the letter Y. The Department of Motor Vehicles has carefully scrutinized the plates and deemed that none are offensive, according to the News and Observer.

They must have overlooked YBF, which means "You've been f****d."
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I think its interesting the way the internet has effected our lives. Here we are at Gather and we can be friends and communicate on a daily basis with people who are on the other side of the planet. We can share our thoughts, feelings, photographs, paintings, just about anything with them. I know I am dating myself here, I grew up in a time when computers really didn't have a large impact on the everyday person. I didn't get a computerized report card until the eleventh grade {Ok I admit it I was a child prodigy :) }. I am the type of person who looks at license plates and thinks about them. Well I actually think about almost everything. For example if I see a license plate that is APT 123 I think, hmmm thats interesting, because it could turn out this person actually does live in apartment 123. You know things that make you go "Hmmmm". However the WTF thing has never occured to me. Users of the internet have developed there own specialized abbreviated jargon. We use expresssions like BRB (be right back), BTW (by the way), WTG (way to go), OMG (oh my G-D or oh my goodness), GL (good luck), TY (thank you) and GN (good night) instead of typing out the whole expression. Here is another way the internet culture has morphed our general culture. Would I mind having WTF or YBF on my license plate. Actually it might be interesting. What do you think?