Article content continued

Dentists, for example, have mostly abandoned the practice of using a smiling cartoon tooth to advertise, because they weren’t fooling anyone. A trip to the dentist is necessary, but mostly stressful, painful and uncomfortable.

Airports are not much different than dentists — with, one hopes, far less drooling.

Here’s how the website explains the rebranding, which took place on Sept. 21, 2016, three days after the 121st anniversary of Dief’s birth. Any brand that needs an explanation, by the way, has failed.

The SK means we are in Saskatchewan, in case you didn’t realize. The SKY represents that our province is the “land of living skies.” As for YXE, here’s the explanation: “You know it, you love it.”

There’s even a pronunciation guide. Sky-ex-ee.

As for the hashtag yxe, nobody loves hashtags. Like airports, we use hashtags only because we have to.

For those who do not use Twitter — that’s 80 per cent of Canadians on whom a hashtag reference may be lost — hashtags became popular shorthand for a particular topic. If you search for #yxe, you could and still will find posts about Saskatoon.

Now that Twitter has expanded from 120 characters to 240, hashtags are far less relevant because there’s less need for brevity. That doesn’t stop some people and organizations from using them to try to sound cool.

YXE, of course, is Saskatoon’s airport code. As airport codes go, it’s terrible. It does not repeat a single letter in our city’s name, unlike the codes for Winnipeg, Regina, Calgary and Edmonton.