I’m an editor by trade, and as a rule, I’m a pretty good speller. I work for a wireless company, editing software documentation. Every now and then, I’ll see a word spelled so far wrong that I need to look it up, even though, I would normally know how to spell it. That happened last week. In this case, the word was pixelated, meaning being able to see the dots (pixels) in a computer graphic. I looked it up in my trusty Webster’s, and they listed pixel, but not pixelated. Well, at least not that pixelated. Webster’s did list pixilated (spelled with an i after the x), but not as meaning being able to see the dots. Pixilated (with an i) is defined as, somewhat unbalanced mentally.
I had heard the term pixilated in a 1936 Frank Capra movie, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. In the court scene at the end of the movie, one of the women from Gary Cooper’s hometown says, he’s pixilated. Now, even in 1936, pixilated was an archaic term, and the judge in the movie asks what it means. One of the other characters explains:
The word “pixilated” is an early American expression derived from the word “pixies,” meaning elves. They would say the pixies had got him. As we nowadays would say, a man is “balmy.”
Balmy is another archaic term, meaning crazy or foolish. Or pixilated.
I seem to remember one time, Alan Alda on the TV show, MASH, saying that his favorite book was the dictionary, because it contains all of the other books. While I won’t go that far, I do love the dictionary, not because of the other books thing, but because it has lots of cool (mostly) trivial info about words.
With that in mind, it made perfect sense to me that the word, pixilated, would be spelled with an i, because it was derived from the word, pixies. Whereas, the word, pixelated, even though it was not listed, would be spelled with an e, because it was derived from the word, pixel. It’s just the type of thing that strikes me as interesting. When you read software documentation all day, you learn to take interesting where you can get it.
So back to work, I was in the middle of editing an Excel file, exported from our software change database. Rememeber, the word pixelated had been spelled so far wrong that I had to look it up, which led to the above-described tangent. Anyway, I finished editing the file and went to run spell-check. I’ve been editing long enough to know that nobody catches everything, so the few minutes to run a spell-check is usually time well spent, even though, in techical material, you always end up ignoring the vast majority of the terms the spell-checker queries.
Anyway, one of the first terms that the spell-check had a problem with was pixelated, which I had just manually corrected it. The spelling suggested by the Excel spell-checker was pixilated, which would be correct when discussing someone’s sanity, but dead-ass wrong when talking about the quality of a computer generated image, as was the case here. This issue with the spell-checker would be the same in Word or presumably any of the Microsoft Office progams.
The worst thing is that I know that I have let the Office spell-checker change the spelling of pixelated to pixilated, just because I never thought to question it. You know, you would think that a computer company as large as Microsoft would have noticed this. After all, pixelated, meaning see the dots, is a fairly common software term, and pixilated, meaning somewhat unbalanced mentally, is term so archaic that it had to be explained to movie audiences of the 1930’s.
It’s enough to make you pixelated.
Links related to this post:
Pixilated - Definition of pixilated from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
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