index of
Americanization.

It is, however, one of the ordinary experiences of social intercourse
that words and things do not have the same meanings with different
people, in different parts of the country, in different periods of time,
and, in general, in different contexts. The same "thing" has a different
meaning for the naive person and the sophisticated person, for the child
and the philosopher; the new experience derives its significance from
the character and organization of the previous experiences. To the
peasant a comet, a plague, and an epileptic person may mean a divine
portent, a visitation of God, a possession by the devil; to the
scientific man they mean something quite different. The word "slavery"
had very different connotations in the ancient world and today. It has a
very different significance today in the southern states and in the
northern states. "Socialism" has a very different significance to the
immigrant from the Russian pale living on the "East Side" of New York
City, to the citizen on Riverside Drive, and to the native American in
the hills of Georgia.

Psychologists explain this difference in the connotation of the same
word among people using the same language in terms of difference in the
"apperception mass" in different individuals and different groups of
individuals. In their phraseology the "apperception mass" represents the
body of memories and meanings deposited in the consciousness of the
individual from the totality of his experiences. It is the body of
material with which every new datum of experience comes into contact, to
which it is related, and in connection with which it gets its meaning.

When persons interpret data on different grounds, when the apperception
mass is radically different, we say popularly that they live in
different worlds. The logician expresses this by saying that they occupy
different "universes of discourse"--that is, they cannot talk in the
same terms. The ecclesiastic, the artist, the mystic, the scientist, the
Philistine, the Bohemian, represent more or less different "universes of
discourse." Even social workers occupy universes of discourse not
mutually intelligible.

Similarly, different races and nationalities as wholes represent
different apperception masses and consequently different universes of
discourse and are not mutually intelligible. Even our remote forefathers
are with difficulty intelligible to us, though always more intelligible
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