The things we learn from cartoons. Eating dinner just now, I found some classic cartoons on MeTV. In the 1947 “Daffy Duck Slept Here,” Porky calls Daffy “pixilated,” and I immediately said, “What?!” I thought it was a term brought to us by the computer revolution.

So I looked it up. It not only predates the home computer and modern graphics, but it predates the Civil War. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary finds a first use of the word in 1848. It meant eccentric or mentally disordered, and was probably formed from a combination of “pixie” and “titillated.”

And now you know, too.