Moral rights (in a text)
through laws, informally through, for example,
social rejection.
Some mores are particular to a specific
society; others can be found in most societies.
A majority of societies respects the sanctity of
human life, though this is varyingly weighed
against the sanctity of social order. Also, within a
society diff erent social groups may have diff er-
ent mores. Traditionally it is against the unwrit-
ten law of school life for pupils to tell tales to
teacher; the sanction against those who do may
be their temporary isolation or ejection from the
group, or reprisals after school.
Mores may often prescribe both the tone
and content of communication. Diff erences in
sexual mores, for example, underpin many of the
arguments about the dissemination of pornog-
raphy.
Morphing In film-making, seamlessly joining
together diff erent images; special eff ects most
notably used in horror movies, when images –
faces, for example – ‘metamorphose’ into one
another or change dramatically in appearance.
Also employed in popular music videos.
Morphology Study of the structure or forms of
words, traditionally distinguished from syntax
which deals with the rules governing the
combination of words in sentences. Generally
morphology divides into two fi elds: the study of
infl ections and of word-formation.
Morse Code See telegraphy.
Mother tongue A term used to refer to an
individual’s language of origin or native language- one learnt from birth, from the mother or
other primary caregivers, and passed on through
the generations. Th e mother or other primary
caregivers may of course provide a bilingual
or multilingual experience for the child. In a
culturally diverse society there is likely to be a
range of mother tongues used, and therefore it
may be the case for a considerable number of
people that their mother tongue diff ers from the
prestige or offi cial language of that society. Such
diff erences in perceived status can be the cause
of resentment.
Keeping the mother tongue alive can be
an important aspect of ethnic identity for a
community. In ‘Mothers and mother tongue:
perspectives on self-construction by mothers
of Pakistani heritage’ in Aneta Pavlenko and
Adrian Blackledge (eds), Negotiation of Identi-
ties in Multilingual Contexts (Multilingual
Matters Ltd, 2004), Jean Mills discusses a study
she undertook with Asian mothers in the West
Midlands. She found that linguistic competence
in the ‘mother tongue’ (Urdu, for example) was
Moral Panics: Th e Social Construction of Devi-
ance (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) examine a number
of moral panics and identify three theories of
moral panic. The ‘grassroots’ model explains
moral panics as stemming from unplanned,
popular responses to perceived societal threats,
whilst the ‘elite-engineered’ model on the other
hand views moral panics as generated and
manipulated by members of powerful elites for
their own purposes. Th e ‘interest group’ model
locates the source of moral panics in interest
groups from ‘somewhere in society’s middle
strata: professional associations, journalists with
a mission, religious groups, social movement
organizations, educational institutions, in fact
middle-level associations, organizations, groups,
and institutions of every description’.
In his introduction to the 3rd edition of Folk
Devils and Moral Panics, Stanley Cohen speaks
of moral panics as ‘condensed political struggles
to control the means of cultural reproduction.
Studying them is easy and lots of fun. It also
allows us to identify and conceptualize the lines
of power in any society, the ways we are manipu-
lated into taking some things too seriously and
other things not seriously enough’.
Anxiety has been widely expressed that modern
society is in a near-permanent state of panic.
Cohen notes that between 1984 and 1991 there
were eight citations of moral panics, and between
1994 and 2001, an average of over a hundred a
year. In his BBC Online blog (11 September 2009),
‘When panic shapes policy’, Mark Easton worries
about the broad social and political impact of
targeting ‘folk devils’: ‘Our democracy is regularly
buff eted by panics which make rational, consid-
ered discussion impossible until the dust settles
years later.’ See deviance (for deviance amplifi -
cation spiral); folk devils; labelling process
(and the media); prejudice.
▶David Altheide, Creating Fear: News and the
Construction of Crisis (Aldine de Gruyler, 2002); Chas
Critcher, ed., Critical Readings: Moral Panics and the
Media (Open University Press/McGraw-Hill Educa-
tion, 2006); Frank Furedi, Politics of Fear: Beyond Left
and Right (Continuum, 2006); Sean Hier, ed., Moral
Panic and the Politics of Anxiety (Routledge eBook,
2011).
Moral rights (in a text) See text: integrity
of the text.
Mores Th ose social rules concerning acceptable
behaviour which it is considered wrong to break.
Such rules play an important part in the main-
tenance of social order and cohesion; conse-
quently breaches of mores usually meet with
the imposition of sanctions by society, formally