Honolulu Lite
Shoot happens. Shoat happens. Even sherbet happens. But SHT doesn't happen. At least not on license plates. License plate letters
of law are so stpdIn a devastating ruling against consonants everywhere, a federal appeals court has said that certain letters cannot be grouped together on motor vehicle license plates if certain dirty-minded judges are able to fill in the vowels and make dirty words out them.
The ruling comes from Vermont, which admittedly usually isn't a trailblazer when it comes to radical black-letter law. Nevertheless, the Vermont case could be felt all the way to Honolulu, Hawaii, or, as they might say at the license plate division, HNLLHW.
Here's what happened in Vermont: A car owner wanted vanity license plates with the letters "SHTHPNS." Some gutter brain at the Vermont motor vehicles department said: "Ah, yup, that's a dirty license plate, all right. You can't have that." Then he went back to sipping raw maple syrup or whatever.
So the car owner sued, saying he had a constitutional right to put the letters "SHTHPNS" on his license plate, because while "sh-t" might "happen" it doesn't mean it's happening on his license plate. The letters could very well refer to shaft happens, shout happens, shallot happens and even showboat happens. Or maybe nothing is happening at all.
Since there is no telling how many other letters are left out or where they would go in the first place, SHTHPNS could even be referring to "sheath plans" "shibboleth pains." "Shibboleth pains" would be a sort of ironic interpretation, since shibboleth means "catchy slogan" and getting certain catchy slogans on a license plate obviously is a pain.
But a federal appeals court, without consulting Judge Judy or any other judge with common sense, ruled that the "SHTHPNS" was a scatological reference and that Vermont had a right to distance itself from such offensive language. (Judge Judy could have pointed out that stupid messages on vanity license plates generally represent the stupidity of the vehicle's owner and seldom the state in general.)
Nevertheless, the City and County of Honolulu has a similarly vague standard for determining what is allowed. You can get a vanity plate for $25 and put any six-letter/number combination on it as long as it is not "misleading" or "objectionable" to the public. This really SCKS because, these days, the public finds just about anything objectionable.
I called the city vehicle registration office to get a list of objectionable license plate letter combinations but discovered that all phone roads end in an unhelpful recorded message. The city's Internet Web site helpfully refers you back to the unhelpful recorded messages.
If you ever have several hours to waste, I suggest you wade into this technological nether world. I don't know if SHTHPNS, but I know where.
Alo-Ha! Friday compiles odd bits of news from Hawaii
and the world to get your weekend off to an entertaining start.
Charles Memminger also writes Honolulu Lite Mondays,
Wednesdays and Sundays. Send ideas to him at the
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., Suite 7-210,
Honolulu 96813, phone 235-6490 or e-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com.
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