Motoring officials in North Carolina are doing their best to clean up the mean streets of America by offering drivers the chance to trade in number plates that bear the potentially offensive letter combination "WTF".
According to the state's Division of Motor Vehicles, almost 10,000 people have been driving around —possibly for years— with WTF licence plates.
But the government department only recently learned the letters were a common acronym for the vulgar phrase "What the f***?", the News & Observer of Raleigh newspaper reports.
The discovery was made by a 60-year-old teacher, whose grandchildren had clued her in to the hidden message in her number plate.
The shocked grandmother complained to the motoring agency, prompting the mass recall.
But is seems the Division of Motor vehicles has not done as thorough a job in cleaning up its own communications.
The department was shocked to discover this week the same letters appeared on the agency's own website in the form of a sample personalised plate.
"I can't believe it," DMV Commissioner Bill Gore told the newspaper when he heard about the online glitch. "Obviously, I didn't know it was there."
donn Wolfsburg Elder
3,515 posts · joined Nov 2005 ·
I dream of a day when a chicken can cross a road without being asked for it's motive!
