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From: Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: License Plates Day (25 April)
Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2024 14:52:44 +0100
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 Ar an séú lá is fiche de mí Aibreán, scríobh Ross Clark: 

 > "How many people recognize the day isn't at all clear."
 > Not me, anyway.

Not me.

 > Crystal briefly discusses prohibitions on words not permitted on
 > personalized ("vanity") plates. There have been a couple of cases here
 > recently -- one involving "NUTSAX" and one, amazingly, "KAREN". The latter
 > was actually the car owner's name, but since the name "Karen" has been
 > weaponized to denote a particular type of annoying person, someone felt
 > obliged to complain that it was offensive -- actually a stereotypically
 > "Karen"ish thing to do. The NZ Transport Agency, who deal with these
 > matters, apparently have no linguistic clues at all, judging by the fact
 > that they took this seriously even for a minute.

I’m fully in favour of vanity licence (number) plates, as long as they are more
expensive than normal licence plates. They’re like patents, a revenue source
for the government that those paying for them are happy to pay. The exact
opposite of taxation.

-- 
‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
(C. Moore)