Now, are those O's, D's or zeros?
Here at Collected Wisdom we've decided we need one of those personalized licence plates for the old '78 AMC Gremlin - something like KNO ITOL or WIZDUMB. Or maybe, in our capacity as arbiter of this column, EDITER.
THE QUESTION: Liz Montgomery of Whitby, Ont., has noticed that standard-issue Ontario licence plates never seem to have Gs in them. Why?
THE ANSWER: "This actually goes back several decades, to when parking tickets and the like were hand-written," says Alan Bones of Ottawa, a member of the Automobile License Plate Collectors Association. He says there was concern the letter G would be confused with the number 6.
"This was particularly significant from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s," he writes, "when letters could appear, mixed with numbers, in any position in a standard vehicle registration (e.g. G6653, 6G653, 66G53, 665G3, 6653G, AG663 and so on). For similar reasons, the letters I and Q have historically not been used. In the 1970s, the letter U was eliminated from standard use (too easily confused with V), and when Ontario went to seven-character standard plates in 1996, the letter O was eliminated (too easy to confuse it with both D and zero)."
Doug Burgess of Kanata, Ont., adds that in 1973, when Ontario adopted a three-letter, three-digit plate format, a detailed study of letter combinations was done to avoid anything that might be considered obscene or objectionable. Nevertheless, he writes, "one of the initial letter combinations issued in Northeastern Ontario, which has a significant francophone population, was FOU, which roughly translates as 'crazy' or 'crazy person,' and it provoked a good deal of negative feedback."
FURTHER NOTICE
Last week, we discussed why we often spell other countries' place names differently than they are spelled there. For instance, we say Rome, the Italians say Roma. The item prompted this response from Jocelyne Revie of the Secretariat for the Geographical Names Board of Canada, at Natural Resources Canada in Ottawa.
"Conventional place names commonly have different forms in different languages due to historical usage. … However, the use of these names, termed 'exonyms,' is losing ground internationally and the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names recommends the use of nationally standardized names, or 'endonyms,' which are the officially recognized local forms for place names within a country. The Geographical Names Board of Canada supports the UNGEGN recommendations, and international maps produced by Natural Resources Canada display endonyms, including Warszawa, obtained from reliable international sources."
HELP WANTED
- Patricia Dawkins of Calgary says she remembers friends working in Banff, Alta., during the 1960s and 1970s calling tourists "gorbys." How did it originate?
- When the government goes into billions of dollars of debt, where does it go to borrow the money? Who has that kind of cash to lend? asks Lucien Saumur of Kanata, Ont.
Send your questions and answers to wisdom@globeandmail.com. Include your name, location and a daytime phone number.