Saudi government bans “lewd” personalized license plates including: “SEX,” “ASS,” and… “USA”?!
(Source: BBC via Autoblog; Photo: Saudi Jeans via Autoblog)
Saudi Arabia recently instated a new type of license plate that is expected to be fitted to 49 million cars in the kingdom. As opposed to the old Arabic-only plates, the new plates feature Arabic and Latin letters and numbers. Drivers can even request that the three letters on the lower right form certain 3-letter English words, like “nut.”But according to the BBC, authorities have published a list words that definitely cannot be placed there, and heading the list of words like “SEX” and “ASS” is this one: “USA.” It hasn’t been explained why “USA” is on the list of Saudi Arabia’s banned words, but such plates and 90,000 others like it are being recalled and replaced with something more acceptable. Personalised plates are popular with wealthy young Saudis. One plate recently sold at auction for 6m riyals ($1.2m), the newspaper reported.
Such license plate controversies are not new in many parts of the English speaking world. Often plates implying profane matter are restricted in the U.S. and for those who remember the recent one from Colorado touting a woman’s love for tofu got a lot of media attention. PETAf iles blog reports that no one driving through Colorado will be seeing the personalized license plate “ILVTOFU” anytime soon, thanks to the DMV’s rejection of the message as “possibly offensive to the general public.” Wait, what? How is loving tofu offensive? As it turns out, the license-plate approver had an entirely different interpretation of the message, as in I-LV-TO-eff-you.
While it’s a creative interpretation, it’s not exactly what the Colorado mother of three vegetarian kids had in mind. Coffman-Lee is a vegan, and as she puts it, “I’m very expressive. I’m anti-fur, anti-rodeo, anti-circus when they come to Denver, and I thought, ‘Here’s a chance to be positive and say I love something.'” She even says that a friend at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animal (PETA) liked the idea so much they were willing to pay the $60 plate fee.Hopefully, with a little explanation and maybe even a tasty sample of the jiggly white stuff, the rejection will be overturned and her car can become the vegetarian-message-on-wheels that it was meant to be.
