HippoPress -- The Hippo -- Guide to Manchester and Nashua NH

From behind, the car’s vanity license plate — TIHSO — didn’t make much sense. It wasn’t until New Hampshire Department of Motor Vehicles director Virginia Beecher saw the car’s front plate in her rear view mirror that she saw the profanity it contained.

“We don’t allow obscenities or words that are unacceptable from a racial or ethnicity standpoint on vanity plates ... [but] people are creative, very creative,” she said.

Indeed, said Beecher, her department maintains a list of unacceptable vanity plate selections that currently numbers 1,500, and one that is growing all the time with the emergence of new, not-so-nice slang. In an average year, she said, the department gets about 100 plate complaints, usually concerning use of racial terms or inappropriate foreign words.

It is said that New Hampshire has one of the lowest vanity plate fees in the country, at $25 a year — a fee which hasn’t increased since the 1970s. As a result, vanity plates are seemingly everywhere, providing Granite staters a relatively cheap way to express themselves, something we do in an myriad of boring and funny and strange and incomprehensible ways.

Of the 979,000 passenger vehicles registered in New Hampshire, 173,482, or nearly 18 percent, of them sport vanity plates, Beecher said. Last fiscal year, the plates raised $4.37 million, which went toward reimbursing the state’s public high schools for their mandated driver’s education programs. The remainder went into the state’s highway fund.

Expressing ourselves

Based on this reporter’s unscientific research, it would seem the majority of vanity plate holders in this state are like AMY, who apparently feels it necessary to inform everyone else on the road of her name. Many others use their initials. Still others don’t use their names at all, opting instead to use descriptions of themselves like NHHOTTY and IMADORK. [For the record, both of the plates were spotted at night. As such, the proported hotness and dorkiness of the aforementioned drivers could not be ascertained.]

Some, it would seem, see vanity plates as a cheap form of advertising. Or maybe people with plates like NH-RLTR or LOANS4U just really identify with their jobs.

But at least that’s better than the drivers who have to tell you what kind of car they’re driving. Thanks, Captain Obvious, but it’s not necessary to tell me that you drive a BMW540, VETTE or MAXIMA. If I care at all, which I don’t, all I have to do is look at the car itself.

Others use their vanity plates to preach to their fellow drivers on everything from politics, DENIS-04, to religion, TRSTGOD, GODISL, WICCA and BUDDHAS. Personal philosophies are big too — LV42DAY, ENJYLF.

Having recently completed what might be New England’s best sports season ever, it’s no surprise to see an abundance of plates like RDSOX-8, RDSXGRL, GO-RSOX and NEPATS1. Of course there are other sports fans up here too, evidenced by plates sporting things like NMBR23 and MARINO.

Still others choose vanity plates as ways to idolize their favorite entertainers. You know, I like the BEATLES and HENDRIX too, but I’d rather spend the $25 on iTunes buying their songs. And you’re sure as hell not going to find me paying to mimic the catch phrases of Donald Trump and Larry the Cable guy with plates reading YRFIRED and GITRDON.

Then of course there are those plates that are utterly indecipherable. I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person, but I can’t make heads or tails of plates like PNPSJ. And I sure can’t understand why someone would fork over $25 a year to have a plate no one understands.

A way of life

For people like Hippo classifieds sales representative Kristin Burgess, vanity plates are a way of life.

Burgess said all four of the license plates she’s ever had have been vanity plates. Her mother and late father always had them too, she said. Her current plate, DAISY1I, honors her one-eyed dog Daisy.

“One of my favorites is one a father with several small children got — PB4UGO,” Beecher said.

The favorite seen by this reporter was spotted in Manchester recently and read CHPSK8, though I find it hard to believe that a cheapskate would pay an extra $25. a year for vanity license plates that proclaimed his frugality.

Perhaps it was meant to be ironic, but then such a stunt would have been a more appropriate for the guy with the plates reading IRONY, whose use of the word irony on a license plate really isn’t ironic.