2HOT4U: License plates and personal identity
This is a piece I’ve been meaning to write for a while. Thanks are due to the Canadian anthropologist Judith Roback, who first got me thinking about the topic of license plates in her comments on a post on nicknames.
Recently, I was listening to an academic talk discussing Covid lockdowns in Ireland when the topic of license plates came up. You see, in Ireland, the middle letters on the license plate identify the county or city where the car is registered. Thus, during lockdown, when people were not allowed to travel more than two kilometres from their home without a compelling reason for doing so, a car registered in Limerick driving on a Dublin road stood out like the proverbial dog’s bollocks – at least, to those of a mind to report on their fellow citizens for violating the rules.
It’s a good illustration that license plates, while we rarely give them a second thought, are not merely innocuous objects – a fact that anyone who has ever received a speeding ticket after being caught on camera will have intuited for themselves. As the legal studies scholar Sarah Marusek notes, license plates are markers of a car and driver’s legal identity. While they provide proof that the car is registered to be on the road and has passed the necessary tests of road worthiness, they also indirectly warrant the ability to drive soundly. No one is allowed to drive a car without a license, even if the car they are driving doesn’t happen to be theirs.
The fact that license plates are simultaneously connected with personal identity and separate from it makes them particularly interesting from an anthropological standpoint.1 After all, license plates create the possibility of mistaken identity, which is why they feature so centrally in stories about crime and people on the run. Stealing a car or swapping a license plate simultaneously draws on the link between license plates and identity and reveals its limitations.
Writing about Bermuda and Barbados in the 1970s, the anthropologist Frank Manning highlighted the central role they played in social life in the small, tight knit communities that dominated the islands at the time. License plates often followed the person rather than the car, so people had the same license plate for life. The license plates themselves were also highly visible and easily memorisable, and thus became ready markers of identity.
This meant that people could generally tell at a glance who was attending church, spending time at a club, or having an affair with a neighbourhood woman, although cases of mistaken identity sometimes occurred. For example, Manning recounts an anecdote about a retired Englishman living in Barbados who had bought a secondhand car in a private sale that, significantly, had retained its original license plate. People immediately assumed that he was having a fling with a local woman, because the car had been spotted ‘parked outside her house all night last week’.
License plates were so widely memorised and known that individuals would frequently use their license plate number as a means of identifying themselves. For example, people might paint their license plate number on their front porch, or on their business sign, or post it on advertisements for dances, which might read something along the lines of ‘Mr Leroy Boyce, owner of Car L408, would like to invite you to a dance being held on Saturday’.
Manning explains this practice in terms of the fact that license plates, like nicknames, are more useful than formal names as identifiers in communities where many people are related and share the same name. In effect, license plates can become a symbol of uniqueness in the face of the depersonalising aspects of living in a social system defined by the principle of extended kinship.
As he observed, this is a very different way of thinking about license plates to the dominant perspective in Anglo-American contexts, where they are seen as the ‘epitome of bureaucratic depersonalization’ – i.e., of being stripped of our uniqueness and reduced to a number. It’s hardly a coincidence that the use of numbers as names is a frequent trope in dystopian sci-fi novels. For example, This Perfect Day by Ira Levin is set in a technocratic dystopia where everyone is assigned a ‘nameber’: the main character’s is ‘Li RM35M4419’.
That said, it’s not entirely true that all government-issued license plates depersonalise people and reduce them to numbers – just ask Minnesotans accused of drink driving, who receive what’s known as a ‘whiskey plate’. Basically the license plate equivalent of a scarlet letter, these plates are a distinctive colour and coded with a ‘W’ to alert law enforcement to the previous legal history of the driver. However, because it’s unconstitutional for police to pull over someone merely because they have a whiskey plate, it has been argued that their primary role is that of public shaming – shame that any other members of the household who happen to drive the car also get to partake in.
While this is a form of plate personalisation that most of us would prefer to avoid, there is, of course, a thriving business in actual personalised license plates, where car owners pay extra to choose their own designation. As the human geographers Daniel McGowin and Jonathan Leib observe, vanity plates ‘stand tantamount to a kind of face-to-face conversation, but with anonymous others’. Through a personalised license plate and other accoutrements such as bumper stickers, you’re basically letting people know who you are without saying a word.
Writing about the South African context, the onomastician (i.e., specialist in the study of names) Bertie Neethling agrees that the goal of vanity plates is to achieve ‘a sense of individualistic uniqueness in a sea of similar looking and rather dull numeric registration plates’. He argues that the choices made are always linked, in one way or another, with ‘a preferred identity aspect of the vehicle owner’ – a point he suggests holds equally true for OLDFART, 2HOT4U and VOTE ANC.
Of course, many personalised plates have meanings that are not self-evident to other drivers. One example Neethling discusses is 786 JAZZ. While sounding like an advertisement for a local radio station, the car in question was owned by a Muslim woman named Jasmina.2 The ‘786’ identified her as Muslim – the number was a popular signifier of religious identity amongst drivers in Cape Town in the noughties, apparently based on the fact that the opening verse of all 114 chapters of the Qu’ran add up to 786. The ‘JAZZ’ obviously comes from her name; she was widely known as ‘Auntie Jazz’.
This illustrates a core problem with license plates: whether other people are going to accurately identify the message you’re trying to send. I can think of no better illustration of this problem than a story I heard from my brother-in-law, a born-and-bred Mancunian and die-hard Manchester City supporter, about the case of a City supporter living in Miami. This fan chose to declare his allegiance to the team by getting a personalised license plate with ‘MAN CITY’ written on it, but quickly learned that the term doesn’t have the same connotations in the US after he was subjected to an endless parade of honking and men flirting with him at stoplights. While he was definitely proclaiming an identity, it wasn’t quite the one he intended.3
Another case of mistaken identity can be found in an episode of Seinfeld in which there is a mixup at the New York Department of Motor Vehicles and Kramer is accidentally assigned the vanity plate ‘ASSMAN’. Although Kramer embraces the identity, Seinfeld and the gang can’t figure out whether it signifies that the real owner gets a lot of arse, has a big arse, likes big arses or examines them for a living (it turns out to be the latter).
That said, there are limits to the level of personalisation possible on vanity plates. As the linguist Frank Nuessel Jr observes, ‘the highly visible and mobile language of personalized plates is subject to routine and often vigorous censorship by officials of the state agency which is charged with the overseeing their dissemination’. For instance, in British Columbia, there is a high rejection rate for vanity plate applications: good luck applying for a license plate bearing the term LUVSEX, IAMBIG, or, indeed, ASSMAN itself.
Things seem to be somewhat freer in the UK, where license plates such as FUGLY (technically, F11GLY), BASTARD (BA53 ARD4) and HELLO TWAT (AL0 2WAT) have been spotted. However, that may well be because British applicants are better at finding ways around the censors. Still, one wonders what aspect of their identity a person who has ‘bastard’ written on their license plate is choosing to emphasise.5
Contrary to Nuessel Jr’s analysis, I’m not convinced that these are literal statements of identity. For example, we can’t assume that the BC resident who unsuccessfully applied to have an INCEST license plate was actually endorsing the concept. Nor, I suspect, does the person who applied for SIFLUS actually suffer from a venereal disease. As Nuessel Jr himself documents, the majority of vetoed license plates relate to sex and drugs, along with other tabooed topics.
Personally, I think these rejected vanity plate applications are best understood as acts of resistance – puerile and self-defeating acts of resistance, obviously, but acts of resistance nonetheless.6 Based on Quora discussions, it is clearly a point of pride for some people to come up with an obscene or silly personalised number plate that makes it past the censors – like my personal favourite below.
Of course, most of us are not stupid enough to saddle ourselves with a car that tells everyone to L1CK1T – even if we manage to get it past the censors in the motor vehicle office. But, really, is this any more offensive than those moronic ‘Baby on board’ stickers people are wont to place on their cars? After all, both are effectively saying the same thing about the owner’s identity, which, to quote the inimitable George Carlin, is ‘Arsehole at the wheel’.
In sum, our license plate says as much about us as our name – considerably more, actually, given that it is linked to our name, date of birth and driving history, as well as our car itself. What’s fascinating about plates is that while the identity they reveal is primarily a legal one, we’ve also turned them into social signs as well, using them to declare our personal and political allegiances, advertise our sexuality and desirability, and channel our most rebellious (and, it must be said, juvenile) impulses.
So the next time you see a personalised plate, don’t roll your eyes. Instead, celebrate the human ingenuity that sees someone look at a series of random numbers on the back of a car and think to themselves, ‘You know what would improve it? Making it say URA 2WAT’.7
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And particularly important from a personal standpoint – at least, if you have few remaining points on your license and have received a speeding ticket after being caught on camera, especially if you can convince someone else to say they were driving the car and thereby take the hit on points in your stead.
How does Neethling know this? Because his main research method was to drive around and, after spotting a motorist with a vanity plate, follow them until they stopped, whereby he would promptly get out his car and quiz them about their plate – an activity that I imagine would promptly get you shot in the US. However, he noted that people were generally very happy to discuss their license plate, which I guess speaks to McGowin and Leib’s point about plates being tantamount to a conversation.
And who can blame the men of Miami for being confused, given that declaring one’s sexual identity via a personalised license plate is fairly common. For example, Neethling discusses license plates in Cape Town such as GAY1 and those that include the letters GWM (gay white male). Likewise, the linguist Frank Nuessel Jr discusses the license plate IM GAY, which someone managed to sneak through the censors.
This one is confusing enough that the car owner has diligently marked the 3 to make it look more like a T. In all honesty, if you’re having to work that hard to make your message understood, this is probably a sign that you should reconsider it. Still, you’ve got to admire the car owner’s commitment.
And, indeed, whether it’s a statement of their identity or an indictment of the other drivers on the road.
There are, obviously, exceptions. For example, I’m pretty sure that the rapist orderly in Kill Bill 1 with the PSY WGN (‘Pussy Wagon’) license plate meant it in a very literal sense. Still, that car saves Uma Thurman’s character’s life, so all hail the Pussy Wagon.
This, of course, is the same human ingenuity that looks at a calculator and immediately thinks ‘I wonder if I can write any dirty words with that?’ (As every child of the eighties knows, 5318008 is ‘BOOBIES’ upside down.)
Interesting enough i own F11GLY "FUGLY" so it was odd to see it on a US website
Thank you for the tribute!
As a Canadian who predated the Vanity Plates phenomenon, and who was unaware of the British system of Registration Numbers on plates, the associating of cars, their owners and the plates was new to me when I encountered it in Guyana, so the local habit of remembering car numbers, and thus the gossip-driven tracking the travels of car and motorbike owners, and the attendant embarrassment or scandal were totally new to me. Now, long back in Canada, I wonder why the holders of Vanity Plates WANT to be able to be identified all over town!
Off on a tangent: I have to a degree retained my old Guyanese habit, however, even so many years later, in that I almost unconsciously learn several digits of the licence numbers of select neighbours and friends, and thus can know or guess whether they are “in residence” or at their country houses/cottages. (Canadian English varies provincially and even regionally within provinces, for the term used for such second abodes and their locales — Southern Ontario tends to say “cottage”, I believe Northern Ontarians say “camp”, as do East Coasters, while when I was growing up in Montreal we named the place not the structure, and said “going to” or “in” “the country”. The small children next door, with 1 set of Montreal grandparents and 1 set of Ontario grandparents, each with “vacation” houses, use “going to the cottage” or “… the country”. depending on which side of the family they will visit!)