Is This Maine License Plate Unintentionally Naughty?

If you’ve lived in Maine for a while, you likely knew that there weren’t a whole lot of restrictions on what you could have on your license plate. A lot of Mainers were having fun using different combinations using both letters and numbers to spell out something really funny and clever, but it began to be a problem when some came to be considered offensive.

Did these drivers ruin the fun for the rest of Maine? That would depend on who you ask, but in the fall of 2022, the state specifically picked out 274 vanity plates registered to Maine drivers. I’m not sure of the exact guidelines that they used in choosing these specific vanity plates, but they were all recalled.

According to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles page of Maine.gov, the rules and regulations are that any combination of letters and numbers that promote violence are prohibited. It also states to "keep in mind" when submitting a combination of numbers and letters that citizens may not understand and/or may be offended by. This seems pretty vague to me, and may just be a way of saying that these vanity plates are reviewed on a case by case situation.

That said, this license plate, clearly not a vanity (at least I don’t think it is), caught my attention. If you drive around a fair amount, you’ll likely notice that there are a lot of cars with four numbers followed by two letters. A lot of times, those two letters are the same on multiple cars.

I noticed a lot of license plates ending in “YS”. Then, to see this one certainly got the teenager in me to let out a solid chuckle.

If you're not picking up on the humor, ask someone around you and I'm confident that between the two of you, you will see the mild-at-best humor that I enjoyed probably more than I should have.

I would imagine that the owner of the car has picked up on the accidental pun and has either reluctantly, or with open arms, accepted it. Is this considered “naughty”? I don’t think so, but even if the state of Maine does, I doubt that they will even notice, unless they happen to read this article, of course.