Following their trend of curtailing the names that parents may choose to give their child, Swedish authorities have now added vehicle number plates to the list of banned nomenclatures. According to the magazine Spraket, the Swedish Road Administration (Vagverket) has determined that 148 three-letter combinations are unacceptable to be printed on vehicle license plates.
Obvious deviant standouts like XXX, SEX, and LSD have been lumped in with more innocuous acronyms such as HUS (house), SJU (seven) and NEJ (no). The crusade to keep Sweden’s roadways free of subversive or sexually-suggestive ideas falls on a small group of Vagverket officials who work in the vehicle registration office in the town of Orebro.
Speaking to Spraket magazine, Vagverket spokesman Mikael Andersson said “we sit down in a room and think about it, and then we remove the combinations which we judge to be offensive. People have very creative imaginations. But we have to be restrictive; otherwise we might run out of letter combinations for licence plates.”
Other letter combinations which have been targeted relate to anger management, such as HAT (hate) and ARG (angry), as well as toilet-based words like BAJ (poo) and TOA (toilet). The car is also deemed an inappropriate forum for voicing political views. Abbreviations like ETA and PLO are banned, as are curse words like FAN. Swedish car owners, however, can still choose FUK if they desire.
I haven’t seen any vulgar or offensive vanity plates in America, but the individual states put whatever restrictions they want on the process. I applaud Sweden for restricting the stupid names parents give their children in America. Children should be protected against names that may cause them embarassment. The other day, someone in our town named their daughter “Indiana Sue.” In this case, the parents right to name their child is not as important as the child’s right to bear a sensible name.
Huh? Like in almost any other country, a plate number is randomly assigned if you don’t pay extra. And to make sure that people don’t get assigned a combination that they *might* deem embarrassing of offensive, there is a block list. The writer seems to think that the combination is chosen by the driver?!
proving once again the Swedes poorly developed sense of humour.
let’s be serious. let’s be Swedish.
In Norway you can’t choose nothing yourself. All plate numbers are randomly dealt by the road authorities. Now that’s communism!
In Germany certain combinations like “KZ”, and “SS” has been banned for 60 years.
this is totaly against human rights , when will your goverment decide how one should breathe