Vanity

["John Hertzman" <johnhertzman@domain.elided>]

Gordy writes "My next ALFA will display 'SPQR'", which is ok, though certainly
not the first Alfa (or other car) to have SPQR, but it has nothing to do with
Alfas in particular apart from their being Italian. In Illinois, where my
sisters live, people who chose an already-taken vanity plate formulation get
the one they had chosen with a number appended indicating their place in the
queue; the elder sister thus has SPQR 5 on her vintage Plymouth Horizon, as
four other Illinoiseries had had the same idea; her reason was that she was a
Latin teacher by profession; others probably chose it because of a profession
in, or at least a serious interest in, the history of the Roman Empire.

The neatest vanity plate I have heard of was also in Illinois, Winnetka
specifically, on a minivan: it was VAN ITTY, which nicely expresses an
attitude toward the whole business.

If I were a vanity-plate type person, which I have not been yet, I would have
considered for my onetime cosmetically altered (shaved, explicitly) Giulietta
Spider, a plate "LHOOQ". An art-historian, but probably few others, would have
known that LHOOQ was the name which Marcel Duchamp had given to one of his
more infamous works of art, a cosmetically altered (unshaved, explicitly)
portrait of a beautiful lady from Milan, the Mona Lisa. Its meaning, which
might have been evident to a punster who was reasonably fluent in French, (and
who knew how the letters themselves are pronounced in French) would have been
appropriate enough if I had thought of the car as an asphalt-ripper (which it
wasn't) and of myself as something of a hot-dog, which I wasn't (and am not),
so I saved the fee.

So, if I were drawn to SPQR - which stands for Senatus Populusque Romanus,
Latin for the senate and the people of Rome, I myself would alter it to SPQM.
And, needless to say, will probably never have a car which might be labeled
SPQT. Partisan, but I am.

Enjoy yours,

John H.

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