Lipton’s Journal/January 24, 1955/230

To condemn. To condeMN. Or NM. Norman Mailer, or in society Mailer, Norman which is MN which is conde Mn. Or cunt and Mailer. I condemn because I see that as a masculine act, and in the past I have been trying to hide my cunt from people. Now I advertise my cunt because I have more confidence in my cock (Do I?) or are the defenses retreating?

Anyway, as I expressed in an earlier note, the sounds of N and M are highly masculine, Glen, Slim, and John, etc. And the sound of ‘r’ is a very active masculine sexual word. It is Red, Rage, Ire, Choler, Rod, Race, Rough, Rail, Roil, Riot. In this sense there are good words and bad words. Words whose meanings and whose consonants and vowels are compatible—there is a psychic onomatopoeia to them. Anglo-Saxon is full of this and the focus of Anglo-Saxon-obscenities. Fuck, piss, cock, shit, cunt, prick, suck, . . . and luck. Luck is the loving fuck the universe gives one. And ‘L’ probably has psychic connotations of tenderness, clinging, fullness—to wit, love, lust, lewd, languish, lair, lie, lady, lass, etc. Now, P and S. Piss and Shit. But there may be a crossing here. Hidden and reversed onomatopoeiasm for Puh is close to the sound of shitting and sssssss is close to the sound of pissing. Thus the Ses and Pes get into words like Shut Up. (Stop pissing and shitting.)

Naturally, everything I’ve said here applies only to English. In other languages there are undoubtedly profound psychic differences in the meanings of sounds because after all the consonants and vowels of foreign languages are never exactly identical to English. I’m not enough of a linguist to trace obscenities and nuances of other languages, but what occurs to me in a small way is that our R in English may be conveyed by the JO (pronounced Cho as in Hebrew) of the Spanish. For example angry is enojo, and red is rojo. Anyway, back to condemn and NM. This entire note came out of the curiosity I felt about leaving out the N in condemning as the last word of note 228.