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Here’s a commercial word from the fine arts, now (March 2008) common in English, that ought to be but is not yet included in either the Oxford English Dictionary or the Unabridged Merriam-Webster. Neither of the two largest English dictionaries can deny the breadth of this word's usage. Giclée is everywhere on the internet at sites where posters and art reproductions are on sale. Artists who depend on their work being reproduced for sale know it and use it daily. Print collectors bandy it about. Giclée appears in the technical manuals of printers. From lips to lips of art-gallery browsers around the world, the word goes awinging. Giclée has been widely used for 15 years, so why dictionary editors have been such obdurate laggards mystifies me. But I do not intend to join them! While the OED is known for its reluctance to include the technical jargon of current science — an old decision that drastically reduces the great dictionary's usefulness — the Unabridged Merriam-Webster does attempt to keep up with the words of modern science, making giclée's absence quite odd.
A giclée (zhee-KLAY) print is a superb-quality copy of an artwork or photograph made using high-end 8-to-12 color inkjet printing techniques coupled with the use of pigment inks, archival inks that maintain image stability and color permanence better than all other known inks. Note that, like many newcomers to English, the French pronunciation of an initial /gi/ is retained. This /gi/ sound is similar to the /s/ in the word pleasure. Giclées typically are printed on large-format special printers from a high-resolution digital scan of the original artwork or photograph. They are printed onto the best media substrates including canvas, fine art papers, and photo-base papers. The color accuracy of the best giclée printing is not exceeded. Giclée prints adorn collections in most large museums of the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. At recent auctions giclée prints have fetched $10,800 for an Annie Leibovitz photograph, $9,600 for Chuck Close, and $22,800 for a Wolfgang Tillmans. Precise Origin of Its English Use The pre-existing French word was borrowed and applied to such prints by Jack Duganne, a California artist and photographer during the 1990s. Thus he did NOT “coin” the word, as some of the more illiterate but artsy-fartsy websites insist. How could he have, my little know-no-word experts, when the French word has existed in print since 1852? As we have come to expect with any term that might earn a grifter a few dishonest dollars, giclée has a proper meaning and a sleazy, fly-by-night, con-artist meaning too. Thus, on certain websites selling copies of posters and famous paintings, what is sold as a giclée print may be smeary, visual garbage spewed from the meretricious nozzle of some one-hundred-dollar inkjet printer by a crack addict in a New Jersey warehouse who finishes the copied work by sneezing on it. Apt here are the most under-regarded two words of sales advice ever uttered, the Latin warning: caveat emptor ‘let the buyer beware.’ Is Sincere Sid’s Online House of Photographical Masterworks going to sell you a genuine giclée print of Lewis Hine’s “Powerhouse Mechanic” (seen below) for six bucks? Probably not. So, brain up and don’t get taken to the cleaners like a clueless ninny.
Etymology of the French Word Giclée Before being applied to the spritz of ink from a computer printer’s inkjet, la giclée was a French noun (in print by 1852 CE) with bountiful explosive meanings. Une giclée could be: a spurt of blood, a burst of machine-gun fire, a splashing with mud — all from the old French verb gicler ‘to spout, to squirt.’ In French computer lingo, one term for the nozzle of an inkjet printer is gicleur. All those related words hark back to a French verb that arose apparently from Gallo-Roman roots that meant ‘to jiggle.’ The French etymologist Pierre Guiraud supposed that some Late Latin verb like citare ‘to shake’ had a frequentative form like *cicitare where partial reduplication of the root supplies the added meaning of frequency. Guirand suggests this eventually degraded in spoken Proto-Romance to a form like *cicare ‘to shake repeatedly.’ Such a verb could have produced the known Franco-Provençal ancestors of gicler, namely jicler < gigler < ciscler < cisclar < gisclar.
Giclée Print Advantages From the admittedly partisan website, Giclée Print Net, Inc., here is a list of giclée print’s advantages: “Giclee prints are advantageous to artists who do not find it feasible to mass produce their work, but want to reproduce their art as needed, or on-demand. Once an image is digitally archived, additional reproductions can be made with minimal effort and reasonable cost. The prohibitive up-front cost of mass production for an edition is eliminated. Archived files will not deteriorate in quality as negatives and film inherently do. Another tremendous advantage of giclee printing is that digital images can be reproduced to almost any size and onto various media, giving the artist the ability to customize prints for a specific client.” In the paragraph above, take note of yet another token of a foreign word's full entry into English use: Americans have begun to drop the acute accent on the first /e/ of giclée. The French word is making itself thoroughly at home amidst the welcoming bounty of our English wordstock. And that’s all I’m printing today about giclées.
2008 © William Gordon Casselman
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