DENVER, CO — What could be more pure and wholesome then tofu? How about a love for tofu so strong that it leads to a vanity plate request? Contrary to popular opinion, there’s nothing respectable about loving tofu, if the Colorado Department of Motor Vehicles is to be taken seriously. In fact, it borders on the obscene.That was the shocking revelation presented to Kelley Coffman-Lee, a vegan with a driver’s license and a vehicle that she’d like to use to communicate her dietary preferences courtesy of a vanity plate. Alas for Coffman-Lee, her “ILVTOFU” request has been emphatically denied – because someone might think it was offensive.
“We don’t allow FU because some people could read that as street language for sex,” Department of Revenue spokesman Mark Couch explained to The Denver Post, presumably with a straight face.
Blame it on Britney Spears, offensensitivity or an over-active imagination, but the end result is the same: Kelley Coffman-Lee isn’t getting her vanity plate.
TOFU is only one of hundreds of letter combinations deemed too saucy, controversial or potentially offensive for the otherwise pristine streets of Colorado. Others include ARS, SIN and PIG, with occasional meetings being conducted in order to dream up other letter combinations that might upset someone somewhere for some reason.
Denver Post writer Tom McGhee says that the explanation presented to him by the government was that such sanitation is required “so that plates stay free of letters that abbreviate gang slang, drug terms or obscene phrases made popular in text messaging.”
WTF? LOL. OMG. (And yes, all of those combinations are forbidden.)
Coffman-Lee, a 38-year-old mother of three, owner of a Suzuki SL-7 and big fan of bean curd finds the whole thing baffling.
“My whole family is vegan, so tofu is a staple for us,” she observed. “I was just going to have a cool license plate and the DMV misinterpreted my message.”
More than a million potentially naughty letter combinations have been kept off of Colorado’s prison made license plates since the 1990s.
For examples of acceptable and unacceptable letter combinations, play the License Plate Game on the Rocky Mountain News website.
