A new word for the 21st century.
Many people now own widescreen TVs. Most new TV programmes are made in widescreen. However TV stations still like to broadcast some older programmes that were made before programmes were made in widescreen. This gives you two options. You can either watch the programme in the correct aspect ratio with black bars down each side. Or you can insist on the whole widescreen area being filled by stretching the image sideways so that everyone looks five stone fatter than they really are. In my opinion this distorted monstrosity is unwatchable, but maybe I'm just too fussy.
This second option is Dixonsvision - because that's how all TVs seem to be configured in every Dixons shop.
Widescreen TV is a bloody menace. It was only invented to sell more tellies! I had a widescreen telly once in a house I shared, and it was crap! We were forever piddling about trying to get the picture right! Worst thing they ever did.
You can always have it chop off the top and bottom off of the picture.
Or there's that weird mode where it streches the left and right of the picture more than the bit in the middle, which works great about ten percent of the time, and the other time causes a "hall of mirrors" effect as people walk across the screen.
My proposed solution is to eventually buy a widescreen television big enough that when it shows 4:3 pictures they're the same size as the current television. And much bigger when it's 16:9.