Lipton’s Journal/January 26, 1955/308

Fuck, piss, cock, shit, cunt. The world outer and inner can probably be constructed from those five words. One would have to bring in “eat” “sleep” “bleed”—all eee sounds, and incidentally socially acceptable. The ih, the ah, and the uh of my five four-letter works are obviously the grunts of love and defecation. And work or labor. And for that matter eating and sleeping. I bet the eee sounds came later, but first the savage had ih, ah, uh, Oh for wonder, and I. But perhaps ‘I’ is the last of all to come, and is the abstraction of ih, ah, uh. With O and E thrown in. Possibly, like colors which when mixed together make white if they are lights, or gray or brown if they are opa que [sic] pigments, so if one could match tapes simultaneously of various vowel sounds, one could find the components of the rich and rather mysterious sound of ‘I’.