RALEIGH, NC — The latest entry in the Looking for Something to be Offended By file comes from North Carolina, where a 60-year-old technology teacher alerted the state to the horrible truth about the letters “WTF,” which sometimes appear on government issued and sanctioned license plates.The Associated Press, which broke the story nationally, does not explain why a 60-year-old technology teacher needed to be whipped into a panic about “WTF” by her teenage grandchildren, who explained its meaning in the IM and text messaging worlds. Perhaps it’s the sign of an outdated belief system, but many Americans like to believe that technology instructors have a useful working knowledge about technology.
Perhaps more importantly, given that the acronym dates from long before the advent of text messaging or the internet, one can only wonder… Where’s The Fire?
The fire, in the government’s case, is slow to burn, but on the rise. A year after the complaint was lodged with the state Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV), the agency has notified nearly 10,000 WTF plate holders about the horrific influence they’ve undoubtedly had on innocent children, and have offered to replace the plates with more benign letter combinations.
Of course, those plates could become immediately suspect if a clever text messager turns the new letter combo into a naughty acronym.
The biggest shock to the DMV system, however, came when it was revealed that not only had the agency been handing out the scandalous letter combination on license plates – but it had been flaunting its indecency on the state DMV website!
“I can’t believe it,” DMV commissioner Bill Gore told the AP. “Obviously, I didn’t know it was there.”
Now, valuable taxpayer resources are being used to remove the “WTF-5505” graphic and place a less potentially offensive sample plate on the government site.
Officials justify the posting of the newly discovered obscenity on the site by explaining that it was the first random letter combination generated after the DMV switched from blue- to red-lettered plates.
BTW and FWIW, WTF is also used to refer to the World Taekwondo Federation, the PlayStation Portable’s Work Time Fun game, the Working Title Films UK film production company, Weight Transfer Front in automobiles during cornering, and both a World of Warcraft Text File and a command line acronym database that first appeared in NetBSD 1.5 and is now used in many Unix operating systems.
One would think a technology instructor might at least be aware of that last one.
Additionally, WTF means Worse Than Failure, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, What’s This For, and, of course, What the Fuck.
