The Lyrics Acquisition Stage (Piaget’s Theory Amended)

The Master, Leonard Cohen, wrote this in 1984.

I’ll be 70 in 7 years and the 70s were my playground. I was 10 going on 11 when they started.  It was then that I discovered the power of music to inspire, soothe, invoke love, and provoke dance.

Piaget’s Theory of the Four Cognitive Periods of childhood development are Sensorimotor stage (0–2 years old) Preoperational stage (2–7 years old) Concrete operational stage (7–11 years old) Formal operational stage (11 years old through adulthood).  Piaget was a famous Swiss child psychologist.  My friend Dale always maintained that the Fourth Stage was The Lyrics Acquisition Phase followed by the Operational Stage as the Fifth.

I agree.

I came of age during the 70s and the early 80s.  Didn’t dive into real adulthood, whatever real might mean, until I was 25.  Before that, I was a party girl.  Party girl in the sense that I was out with friends all the time — all the time — loading lyrics into my brain.  We were dancing, we were at concerts, we were cruising around listening to the car stereo, we were in someone’s basement listening to Pink Floyd until 2, 3, and 4 a.m.

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