WE CAN LEARN from sitcoms.

In a new NBC series titled "Hope and Gloria," Hope asks Gloria's ex-husband, Louis, for advice on what men want. Louis says he can respond only for himself: "A big-screen TV, 800 pixels to the inch."

When Hope asks what pixels are, Louis explains, "That's what they call those little dots."

A pixel is a word created from "pictures," or "pix," and "elements." The phrase "picture element" was first used in 1927 in the magazine Wireless World, writing about "the mosaic of dots, or picture elements." By 1969, Science magazine was describing how it was possible to tape-record "the analog video signal from each pixel" in photos sent back from space by Mariner 6.

A pixel is the smallest part of the video screen than can be turned on or off or varied in intensity. It is what seems to be a single dot on your computer screen or TV set; if it's a color screen, it's really three dots together, or clusters of red, green and blue -- the triad of colors that, when energized, add up to white or, when the set is turned off, show as black.

"The most common computer resolution," Bill Howard, executive editor of PC Magazine, tells me, "has 640 pixels across by 480; this is the Video Graphics Array, or VGA. Higher-resolution monitors may have 800 by 600 (SVGA, S for "super") or 1,024 by 768 (no abbreviation or acronym commonly agreed on yet for this)."

(I am writing this on a 1,024 by 768 computer screen, which I call HBVGA, for "Hoo-Boy Video Graphics Array," an appellation I happily commend to the computer world, which seems to be groping madly for a superlative above "super.")

We're talking here about resolution, or the sharpness of an image. It used to be expressed in the number of lines to the TV screen; a good picture for a regular broadcast had close to 500 lines. Nowadays people count pixels, and the more available the better, from Louis's 800 pixels to my own computer screen HBVGA standards.

If the noun is here, can the verb be far behind? In a review of Mick Jagger's performance in a Rolling Stones concert, Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote, "Pixilation effects on the video screen also make him look more hyperactive than he actually is."

"Alert!" signals Judith Economos of Scarsdale, N.Y. "A wonderful word is about to be commandeered by a formation on pixels. Do something!"

No; pixilation has been kicking around the language for a half-century to describe a technique of cinematographers and stage managers to make human performers appear to move as if artificially animated. Using a stop-frame camera, the pixilator can distort and speed up the motion of actors, thereby making Mr. Jagger, perhaps growing lethargic with the years, look more frantically animated than ever.

Based on that noun, the modern verb pixilate invites confusion with an earlier pixilated: "bemused, fey, whimsical" or "slightly and happily drunk." This is formed from the noun pixie, a mischievous sprite or fairy, who is pictured with a pointed, conical hat; it is not known if the pixie got his name from the pixie cap or vice versa.

In coining the modern verb, did cinematographers intend the jerky movements of the subjects to reflect the older meaning connoting whimsy and tipsiness? This is like asking what came first, the pixie or the pixie cap.

The solution to the confusion is this: Spell pixilated from the sprite, meaning "intoxicated," with an i after the x, and spell pixelate derived from the photographic technique with an e after the x.

I'm inclined to put this useful distinction on line, introduced by Gary Muldoon's near palindrome, "Modem, I'm Odem," coined on the analogy of "Madam, I'm Adam." I cannot enforce this spelling split, but good sense sometimes prevails; put on a funny hat and give it a pixie-esque shot. Run to Saving Daylight

Today, as you have been reminded by people irritated at having been kept waiting an hour, marks the onset of Daylight Saving Time.

Not Daylight Savings Time. As an adjective, saving -- without the s -- has the sense of "rescuing" (a game-saving catch), "redeeming" (a saving grace) and "economical" (a saving housekeeper). As a noun, a saving is something that is saved.

"Daylight saving" moves the clock forward an hour -- the mnemonic is "Spring forward, fall back" (the first m in mnemonic is silent; how do you remember that?) -- to gain extra daylight at the end of the day. The British prefer "Summer Time," first used in 1916, although their season stretches from the end of March to October. Before the official adoption of "Summer Time," a 1908 "Daylight Saving Bill" had been introduced in England "to promote the earlier use of daylight in the summer."

Congress adopted "Daylight Saving Time" in 1918 to save electricity and coal during World War I, but farmers forced its repeal in 1919, making it subject to local legislation. According to Stuart Berg Flexner in "Listening to America," the bill passed again in 1966 as the Uniform Time Act over the protests of farmers, because "there were fewer of them to protest: America had become an urban nation since 1919."

In using the gerund, here's the hard part: when does a saving become savings? Answer: When it is the sum of acts of saving. You deny yourself and make a saving here, you find a bargain and make a saving there, and all of a sudden you have a pile of savings, which you take to a bankrupt Savings and Loan Association, or open a savings account in a savings bank.

The advertiser who touts "great savings throughout the store" is correct, because the reductions are plural; the hawker of "pre-owned vehicles" who raves about "a huge savings on this baby" is acting as if one saving were more than one, and thereby gives used-car selling a bad name. One purchase at a lowered price is a saving; it takes two to add up to savings. (People who like to pluralize singulars love to verbify nouns.)

Saving space, the saving in "daylight saving time" is often dropped when a time zone appears: on the East Coast, the term is expressed as "Eastern daylight time," abbreviated "E.D.T." Federal law marks daylight time, in areas that do not exempt themselves, from 2 A.M. on the first Sunday of April until 2 A.M. on the last Sunday of October.

In talking about the kind of time we have in the summer, we use a compound -- daylight saving -- and a case could be made for hyphenating it (as The Associated Press does), or running it together as one word, but I am not about to take on that battle today, because I am an hour late already.

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