Yesterday, I went into a nearby town with a friend. The purpose of the trip was lunch and a browse round the shops looking for nothing in particular.

I'm sure that I've mentioned in the past, my love of a bargain and that I'm not averse to making use of "recycled" stuff, so it was inevitable that my attention should be attracted by a market stall which was selling second hand goods on behalf of a charity.

There were items many and varied for sale, but I was drawn to the books, there,in a box marked up at 10pence each (obviously stuff no-one wanted) I found Funk and Wagnalls Standard Desk Dictionary Volume 1 A-M, published by Funk and Wagnalls,Inc., New York in 1975.

Many people would have turned their nose up at it as a bit of old tat, but not me, I found the brown cover with its gold lettering quite endearing and I thought I would definately get more than ten pennorth of browsing from it, (ok, call me a geek if you must, I suppose browsing dictionaries is a bit wierd)

Anyway, let's get to the point, I selected the book and another one (a novel) and held them out with my shiny 20pence piece to the guy. "Oh, Funk and Wagnall" he said "I'll tell you what, I'll throw this one in for free" and he produces Funk and Wagnalls Standard Desk Dictionary Volume 2 N-Z.

He deftly slipped the second volume into the bag with the others, in a way that seemed almost pre-meditated and handed the bag to me with a smile, or was it a smirk? he seemed pleased to have been party to the maintenance of the books as a pair, or was he just glad to be rid of them? less stuff to pack away later.

Well whatever his reasoning, I'm glad that he did, because Volume N-Z has provide a topic for this post; Pixilated this was the first word that caught my eye when I opened the book, at the top of page 501 in bold was pizzicato but I didn't notice that. As I said pix-i-la-ted was where my eyes alighted. Meaning - Affected by the pixies; mentally unbalanced or slang for drunk. How appropriate was that! seems that the book was trying to tell me something and I thought pixilated was something to do with those little squares that appear on the TV screen when the digital signal is scrambled, so in these days of modern technology, we can still learn something from a 33 year old dictionary.

Bye for now x MSS