Acquiring Taste

As I understand him, Noam Chomsky's basic argument, against the tabula rasa-ist/empirical, gradually pieced-together theory of language acquisition, is that children actually proceed, at a much faster, conceptually synthetic and hyper-logical rate than such a system would allow, actually to speak  and rationalize the core-logical elements of speech.  Which, as was noted by Ancient Greeks, is the same as reason itself.  We lithp in numberth for the numberth come.

So it was for me in the acquisition of critical acumen, otherwise known as taste.  For the Christmas of my seventh year, my "Uncles Delmer and Doc" (presumably my Uncle Delmer's wife Della) sent me, by Santa's infinitely capacious sleigh, a two-volume set of fairy tales:  one, bound in blue, being a heavily redacted (though not, thank heaven, completely bowdlerized) copy of Grimms' Fairy Tales; the other, bound in gold, being a selection of Hans Christian Andersen's already literacized and polished, self-conscious "Children's Tales."  I loved the former, with all its gleeful sadism,  and loathed the latter--particularly execrating the protracted morbidity of "The Snow Queen," the Moral Insanity of which, though I had not then words for, both shocked and disgusted me.  Still does.