I love personalized license plates.  I especially like the ones that so creatively use the sound of letters or numbers to build their plate – plates like N2 COWS or GR8T or 4SAKEN.  My dad often talks about his favorite personalized plate of all time – CME2PEE.  It belonged to a urologist.

I love my personalized plate – IDEALST, but sometimes after seeing a super creative plate I long to come up with something that takes more effort to read…something so clever that everyone who reads it and understands it admires me for my creativity.  It only takes a few minutes toying around on the North Dakota personalized license plate search site  for me to realize that all the really good things I come up with were already thought of  by more brilliant personalized plate owners.

I think I notice personalized plates more than most.  That is how I came to my most recent curiosity.  I saw a plate late last week that read TECHER.  I immediately thought the plate intended to convey the word teacher.  If that was the plate’s point – mission accomplished.  But I have to tell you, I have been haunted by that plate.  I want to know why a teacher would leave the “a” (of all things) out of teacher?  Why not leave out the second “e” or have the plate read I TEACH?  Why not EDUCATE or EDUCATR?  How did a teacher reconcile dropping the “a” from the plate?

Normally I would appluad such an attempt, but the lack of the “a” in the word teacher is driving me crazy.  I want to know why?  Why no “a”?

Unless the plate was never intended to be read as teacher but instead was something else all together – perhaps it was technology-focused…perhaps it was “TECH”ER.  Or maybe it was the person’s last name or a nickname.  If you know the answer – I sure do want to know – or perhaps I should say, IWNT2NO. 😉

Day nine hundred and sixty-seven of the new forty – obla di obla da

Ms. C