Thanks all for testing the smut filter and sending in your dirty foreign number plates — see the comments on the previous post.

Mel Mistica has discovered that kiki is not the only Tagalog word that sets off alarms at the RTA. You can’t have bobo (‘dumb head’, ‘retard’) or butu (‘dick’) but it does allow pekpek which is equivalent to kiki in Kapampangan, another major language of the northern Philippines.

Mel also pointed out that the kiki story was considered newsworthy in Spain, a country that once ruled the Philippines.

But at least one Spanish word eluded the smut filter.  Cameron Manning pointed out that carajo (‘penis’) makes it through:

¡Ay carajo!

And Will Owen gave us kuna (‘shit’) and kumpu (‘piss’) from Pitjantjatjara, with same meaning in a bunch of Australian languages.

Through trial and error, Aidan Wilson noticed that when the RTA design-a-plate site comes back to you with the specific response ‘The nominated plate content is not available’, you’ve hit their multilingual insult-profanity-vulgarity detecting radar.