Tag censors don't wine on the job

It isn't easy being censors for vanity license plates in Utah.

You wouldn't believe the effort people expend to create clever words and acronyms to sneak past them.

To make matters worse, their work gets inspected by hundreds of motorists every day, and heaven help you if one escapes their attention.

Like MERLOT.

Most people don't know this, but two people are assigned to ensure that certain words or acronyms don't wind up on vanity license plates. They sift through some 600 requests a month and deny as many as a half-dozen.

They're good at their jobs, but every now and then they miss one. Last month somebody complained about a vanity plate that read MERLOT. It blew up into the kind of controversy that Utah's culture seems to inspire regularly.

It's difficult to say which was more embarrassing: The fact that the plate went unnoticed for 10 years before anybody in the state realized MERLOT is a wine, or the fact that somebody bothered to report it at all. The owner was forced to turn over the plate.

It made the national news.

WAIT, MERLOT IS WINE? Read a headline in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Maybe Utahns thought it referred to the magician in King Arthur's court.

Apparently, we don't know our wine list. "I'm a little rusty on my French, too," said Tax Commission spokesman Charlie Roberts.

WAIT, MERLOT IS FRENCH?

The Utah State Tax Commission, which oversees the Division of Motor Vehicles, denies requests for vanity plates that are judged to be vulgar, gang-related, obscene or promote illegal activity, alcohol and drugs, or are related to body parts, body functions or show contempt of a race, religion, gender, political affiliation.

Did they miss anything?

It's almost a full-time job for the two people, whose task is essentially to play a word-scramble game for hours each day.

88BB8 appears harmless enough — unless you're a cop. Just try to determine if those are 8's or B's when the car is moving.

JAKNCOK? No good. It's Jack Daniels and Coke.

The point is, our censor duo has to be one step ahead of a crowd that is always trying to slip one by them.

"They have to keep up with gang lingo and foreign languages and slang, and that can be tough," says Roberts. "It evolves every day. It's a lot tougher job than you think."

The censor duo — who weren't made available for interviews — use a number of sources to keep up with the ever-changing lingo such as English and foreign-language online dictionaries, insultmonger.com, slangsearch.com, acronymfinder.com, drugs.indiana.edu, etc. They also consult people in the community who are familiar with gangs, ethnic cultures, the drug culture and so forth.

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