Comics and the graphic novel in Italian

Lo schizzo preparatorio is the rough an artist throws down before drawing the page properly, and the noun is one that English has been using all along without knowing whose it was. « Sketch » is schizzo. The Italian word travelled north with painters and studio talk into Dutch, which wrote it schets, and English took it from there in the seventeenth century — which is why the vowel and the ending look nothing like the original while the sense arrived intact. What did not make the journey is the other half of the word. In Italian, schizzare is first of all to squirt or to splash: uno schizzo di fango is a spatter of mud up a trouser leg, and l’acqua schizza dal rubinetto is water spurting out of a tap. The drawing sense grew out of that one — something flung down fast, in a single movement — so lo schizzo preparatorio still has a splash inside it, and « sketch » left the splash behind.