Full Idea
The construction of 'alternation' (using 'or') is useful in practice, but superfluous in theory. It can be paraphrased using only negation and conjunction. We say that 'p or q' is paraphrased as 'not(not-p and not-q)'.
Gist of Idea
We can eliminate 'or' from our basic theory, by paraphrasing 'p or q' as 'not(not-p and not-q)'
Source
Willard Quine (Philosophy of Logic [1970], Ch.2)
Book Reference
Quine,Willard: 'Philosophy of Logic' [Prentice-Hall 1970], p.24
A Reaction
Quine treats 'not' and 'and' as the axiomatic logical connectives, and builds the others from those, presumably because that is the smallest number he could get it down to. I quite like it, because it seems to mesh with basic thought procedures.