title: Freedom of speech

text: Milton's defense of freedom of expression was grounded in a Protestant worldview. He thought that the English people had the mission to work out the truth of the Reformation, which would lead to the enlightenment of all people. Nevertheless, Milton also articulated the main strands of future discussions about freedom of expression. By defining the scope of freedom of expression and "harmful" speech, Milton argued against the principle of pre-censorship and in favor of tolerance for a wide range of views. Freedom of the press ceased being regulated in England in 1695 when the Licensing Order of 1643 was allowed to expire after the introduction of the Bill of Rights 1689 shortly after the Glorious Revolution. The emergence of publications like the "Tatler" (1709) and the "Spectator" (1711) are credited for creating a 'bourgeois public sphere' in England that allowed for a free exchange of ideas and information.


title: Freedom of speech

text: More governments attempted to centralize control as the "menace" of printing spread. The French crown repressed printing and the printer Etienne Dolet was burned at the stake in 1546. In 1557 the British Crown thought to stem the flow of seditious and heretical books by chartering the Stationers' Company. The right to print was limited to the members of that guild. Thirty years later, the Star Chamber was chartered to curtail the "greate enormities and abuses" of "dyvers contentyous and disorderlye persons professinge the arte or mystere of pryntinge or selling of books". The right to print was restricted to two universities and the 21 existing printers in the city of London, which had 53 printing presses. As the British crown took control of type founding in 1637, printers fled to the Netherlands. Confrontation with authority made printers radical and rebellious, with 800 authors, printers, and book dealers being incarcerated in the Bastille in Paris before it was stormed in 1789.


title: Freedom of speech

text: A succession of English thinkers was at the forefront of early discussion on a right to freedom of expression, among them John Milton (1608–74) and John Locke (1632–1704). Locke established the individual as the unit of value and the bearer of rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. However, Locke's ideas evolved primarily around the concept of the right to seek salvation for one's soul. He was thus primarily concerned with theological matters. Locke neither supported a universal toleration of peoples nor freedom of speech; according to his ideas, some groups, such as atheists, should not be allowed.


title: Freedom of speech

text: By the second half of the 17th century philosophers on the European continent like Baruch Spinoza and Pierre Bayle developed ideas encompassing a more universal aspect freedom of speech and toleration than the early English philosophers. By the 18th century the idea of freedom of speech was being discussed by thinkers all over the Western world, especially by French philosophes like Denis Diderot, Baron d'Holbach and Claude Adrien Helvétius. The idea began to be incorporated in political theory both in theory as well as practice; the first state edict in history proclaiming complete freedom of speech was the one issued 4 December 1770 in Denmark-Norway during the regency of Johann Friedrich Struensee. However Struensee himself imposed some minor limitations to this edict on 7 October 1771, and it was even further limited after the fall of Struensee with legislation introduced in 1773, although censorship was not reintroduced.


title: Freedom of speech

text: John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) argued that without human freedom, there could be no progress in science, law, or politics, which according to Mill, required free discussion of opinion. Mill's "On Liberty", published in 1859, became a classic defence of the right to freedom of expression. Mill argued that truth drives out falsity, therefore the free expression of ideas, true or false, should not be feared. Truth is not stable or fixed but evolves with time. Mill argued that much of what we once considered true has turned out false. Therefore, views should not be prohibited for their apparent falsity. Mill also argued that free discussion is necessary to prevent the "deep slumber of a decided opinion". Discussion would drive the march of truth, and by considering false views, the basis of true views could be re-affirmed. Furthermore, Mill argued that an opinion only carries intrinsic value to the owner of that opinion, thus silencing the expression of that opinion is an injustice to a basic human right. It is generally held that for Mill, the only instance in which speech can be justifiably suppressed is to prevent harm from a clear and direct threat. Neither economic or moral implications nor the speaker's own well-being would justify suppression of speech. However Mill in "On Liberty" suggests the speech of pimps — instigating clients and sex workers to have sex — should be restricted. This suggests he may be willing to restrict some speech that, while not harming others, undermines their decisional autonomy.


title: Freedom of speech

text: In her 1906 biography of Voltaire, Evelyn Beatrice Hall coined the following sentence to illustrate Voltaire's beliefs: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". Hall's quote is frequently cited to describe the principle of freedom of speech. Noam Chomsky stated, "If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like. Dictators such as Stalin and Hitler, were in favor of freedom of speech for views they liked only. If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise". Lee Bollinger argues that "the free speech principle involves a special act of carving out one area of social interaction for extraordinary self-restraint, the purpose of which is to develop and demonstrate a social capacity to control feelings evoked by a host of social encounters". Bollinger argues that tolerance is a desirable value, if not essential. However, critics argue that society should be concerned by those who directly deny or advocate, for example, genocide (see limitations above).


title: Freedom of speech

text: As chairman of the London-based PEN International, a club which defends freedom of expression and a free press, English author H. G. Wells met with Stalin in 1934 and was hopeful of reform in the Soviet Union. However, during their meeting in Moscow, Wells said, "the free expression of opinion—even of opposition opinion, I do not know if you are prepared yet for that much freedom here".


title: Freedom of speech

text: The 1928 novel "Lady Chatterley's Lover" by D. H. Lawrence was banned for obscenity in several countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Canada, and India. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, it was the subject of landmark court rulings that saw the ban for obscenity overturned. Dominic Sandbrook of "The Telegraph" in the UK wrote, "Now that public obscenity has become commonplace, it is hard to recapture the atmosphere of a society that saw fit to ban books such as "Lady Chatterley's Lover" because it was likely to 'deprave and corrupt' its readers". Fred Kaplan of "The New York Times" stated the overturning of the obscenity laws "set off an explosion of free speech" in the U.S. The 1960s also saw the Free Speech Movement, a massive long-lasting student protest on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley during the 1964–65 academic year.


title: Freedom of speech

text: In contrast to Anglophone nations, France was a haven for literary freedom. The innate French regard for the mind meant that France was disinclined to punish literary figures for their writing, and prosecutions were rare. While it was prohibited everywhere else, James Joyce's "Ulysses" was published in Paris in 1922. Henry Miller's 1934 novel "Tropic of Cancer" (banned in the U.S. until 1963) and Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover" were published in France decades before they were available in the respective authors' home countries.


title: Freedom of speech

text: In 1964 comedian Lenny Bruce was arrested in the U.S. due to complaints again about his use of various obscenities. A three-judge panel presided over his widely publicized six-month trial. He was found guilty of obscenity in November 1964. He was sentenced on 21 December 1964, to four months in a workhouse. He was set free on bail during the appeals process and died before the appeal was decided. On 23 December 2003, thirty-seven years after Bruce's death, New York Governor George Pataki granted him a posthumous pardon for his obscenity conviction.


title: Freedom of speech

text: In the United States, the right to freedom of expression has been interpreted to include the right to take and publish photographs of strangers in public areas without their permission or knowledge. This is not the case worldwide.


title: Freedom of speech

text: In some countries, people are not allowed to talk about certain things such as Lèse-majesté which is an offence against the dignity of a reigning sovereign or against a state. Doing so constitutes an offence. For example, Saudi Arabia is responsible for executing journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. As he entered the Saudi embassy in Turkey, a team of Saudi assassins killed him. Another Saudi writer, Raif Badawi, was arrested in 2012 and lashed.


title: Silver

text: Silver is a chemical element with the symbol Ag (from the Latin "", derived from the Proto-Indo-European "h₂erǵ": "shiny" or "white") and atomic number 47. A soft, white, lustrous transition metal, it exhibits the highest electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity, and reflectivity of any metal. The metal is found in the Earth's crust in the pure, free elemental form ("native silver"), as an alloy with gold and other metals, and in minerals such as argentite and chlorargyrite. Most silver is produced as a byproduct of copper, gold, lead, and zinc refining.


title: Silver

text: Silver has long been valued as a precious metal. Silver metal is used in many bullion coins, sometimes alongside gold: while it is more abundant than gold, it is much less abundant as a native metal. Its purity is typically measured on a per-mille basis; a 94%-pure alloy is described as "0.940 fine". As one of the seven metals of antiquity, silver has had an enduring role in most human cultures.


title: Silver

text: Other than in currency and as an investment medium (coins and bullion), silver is used in solar panels, water filtration, jewellery, ornaments, high-value tableware and utensils (hence the term "silverware"), in electrical contacts and conductors, in specialized mirrors, window coatings, in catalysis of chemical reactions, as a colorant in stained glass, and in specialized confectionery. Its compounds are used in photographic and X-ray film. Dilute solutions of silver nitrate and other silver compounds are used as disinfectants and microbiocides (oligodynamic effect), added to bandages, wound-dressings, catheters, and other medical instruments.


title: Silver

text: Silver is similar in its physical and chemical properties to its two vertical neighbours in group 11 of the periodic table: copper, and gold. Its 47 electrons are arranged in the configuration [Kr]4d5s, similarly to copper ([Ar]3d4s) and gold ([Xe]4f5d6s); group 11 is one of the few groups in the d-block which has a completely consistent set of electron configurations. This distinctive electron configuration, with a single electron in the highest occupied s subshell over a filled d subshell, accounts for many of the singular properties of metallic silver.


title: Silver

text: Silver is a relatively soft and extremely ductile and malleable transition metal, though it is slightly less malleable than gold. Silver crystallizes in a face-centered cubic lattice with bulk coordination number 12, where only the single 5s electron is delocalized, similarly to copper and gold. Unlike metals with incomplete d-shells, metallic bonds in silver are lacking a covalent character and are relatively weak. This observation explains the low hardness and high ductility of single crystals of silver.


title: Silver

text: Silver has a brilliant, white, metallic luster that can take a high polish, and which is so characteristic that the name of the metal itself has become a colour name. Unlike copper and gold, the energy required to excite an electron from the filled d band to the s-p conduction band in silver is large enough (around 385 kJ/mol) that it no longer corresponds to absorption in the visible region of the spectrum, but rather in the ultraviolet; hence, silver is not a coloured metal. Protected silver has greater optical reflectivity than aluminium at all wavelengths longer than ~450 nm. At wavelengths shorter than 450 nm, silver's reflectivity is inferior to that of aluminium and drops to zero near 310 nm.


title: Silver

text: Very high electrical and thermal conductivity are common to the elements in group 11, because their single s electron is free and does not interact with the filled d subshell, as such interactions (which occur in the preceding transition metals) lower electron mobility. The thermal conductivity of silver is among the highest of all materials, although the thermal conductivity of carbon (in the diamond allotrope) and superfluid helium-4 are higher. The electrical conductivity of silver is the highest of all metals, greater even than copper. Silver also has the lowest contact resistance of any metal. Silver is rarely used for its electrical conductivity, due to its high cost, although an exception is in radio-frequency engineering, particularly at VHF and higher frequencies where silver plating improves electrical conductivity because those currents tend to flow on the surface of conductors rather than through the interior. During World War II in the US, tons of silver were used for the electromagnets in calutrons for enriching uranium, mainly because of the wartime shortage of copper.


title: Silver

text: Silver readily forms alloys with copper, gold, and zinc. Zinc-silver alloys with low zinc concentration may be considered as face-centred cubic solid solutions of zinc in silver, as the structure of the silver is largely unchanged while the electron concentration rises as more zinc is added. Increasing the electron concentration further leads to body-centred cubic (electron concentration 1.5), complex cubic (1.615), and hexagonal close-packed phases (1.75).


title: Silver

text: Naturally occurring silver is composed of two stable isotopes, Ag and Ag, with Ag being slightly more abundant (51.839% natural abundance). This almost equal abundance is rare in the periodic table. The atomic weight is 107.8682(2) u; this value is very important because of the importance of silver compounds, particularly halides, in gravimetric analysis. Both isotopes of silver are produced in stars via the s-process (slow neutron capture), as well as in supernovas via the r-process (rapid neutron capture).


title: Silver

text: Twenty-eight radioisotopes have been characterized, the most stable being Ag with a half-life of 41.29 days, Ag with a half-life of 7.45 days, and Ag with a half-life of 3.13 hours. Silver has numerous nuclear isomers, the most stable being Ag ("t" = 418 years), Ag ("t" = 249.79 days) and Ag ("t" = 8.28 days). All of the remaining radioactive isotopes have half-lives of less than an hour, and the majority of these have half-lives of less than three minutes.


title: Silver

text: Isotopes of silver range in relative atomic mass from 92.950 u (Ag) to 129.950 u (Ag); the primary decay mode before the most abundant stable isotope, Ag, is electron capture and the primary mode after is beta decay. The primary decay products before Ag are palladium (element 46) isotopes, and the primary products after are cadmium (element 48) isotopes.


title: Silver

text: The palladium isotope Pd decays by beta emission to Ag with a half-life of 6.5 million years. Iron meteorites are the only objects with a high-enough palladium-to-silver ratio to yield measurable variations in Ag abundance. Radiogenic Ag was first discovered in the Santa Clara meteorite in 1978. Pd–Ag correlations observed in bodies that have clearly been melted since the accretion of the Solar System must reflect the presence of unstable nuclides in the early Solar System.


title: Silver

text: Silver is a rather unreactive metal. This is because its filled 4d shell is not very effective in shielding the electrostatic forces of attraction from the nucleus to the outermost 5s electron, and hence silver is near the bottom of the electrochemical series ("E"(Ag/Ag) = +0.799 V). In group 11, silver has the lowest first ionization energy (showing the instability of the 5s orbital), but has higher second and third ionization energies than copper and gold (showing the stability of the 4d orbitals), so that the chemistry of silver is predominantly that of the +1 oxidation state, reflecting the increasingly limited range of oxidation states along the transition series as the d-orbitals fill and stabilize. Unlike copper, for which the larger hydration energy of Cu as compared to Cu is the reason why the former is the more stable in aqueous solution and solids despite lacking the stable filled d-subshell of the latter, with silver this effect is swamped by its larger second ionisation energy. Hence, Ag is the stable species in aqueous solution and solids, with Ag being much less stable as it oxidizes water.


title: Silver

text: Most silver compounds have significant covalent character due to the small size and high first ionization energy (730.8 kJ/mol) of silver. Furthermore, silver's Pauling electronegativity of 1.93 is higher than that of lead (1.87), and its electron affinity of 125.6 kJ/mol is much higher than that of hydrogen (72.8 kJ/mol) and not much less than that of oxygen (141.0 kJ/mol). Due to its full d-subshell, silver in its main +1 oxidation state exhibits relatively few properties of the transition metals proper from groups 4 to 10, forming rather unstable organometallic compounds, forming linear complexes showing very low coordination numbers like 2, and forming an amphoteric oxide as well as Zintl phases like the post-transition metals. Unlike the preceding transition metals, the +1 oxidation state of silver is stable even in the absence of π-acceptor ligands.


title: Silver

text: Silver does not react with air, even at red heat, and thus was considered by alchemists as a noble metal, along with gold. Its reactivity is intermediate between that of copper (which forms copper(I) oxide when heated in air to red heat) and gold. Like copper, silver reacts with sulfur and its compounds; in their presence, silver tarnishes in air to form the black silver sulfide (copper forms the green sulfate instead, while gold does not react). Unlike copper, silver will not react with the halogens, with the exception of fluorine gas, with which it forms the difluoride. While silver is not attacked by non-oxidizing acids, the metal dissolves readily in hot concentrated sulfuric acid, as well as dilute or concentrated nitric acid. In the presence of air, and especially in the presence of hydrogen peroxide, silver dissolves readily in aqueous solutions of cyanide.


title: Silver

text: The three main forms of deterioration in historical silver artifacts are tarnishing, formation of silver chloride due to long-term immersion in salt water, as well as reaction with nitrate ions or oxygen. Fresh silver chloride is pale yellow, becoming purplish on exposure to light; it projects slightly from the surface of the artifact or coin. The precipitation of copper in ancient silver can be used to date artifacts, as copper is nearly always a constituent of silver alloys.


title: Silver

text: Silver metal is attacked by strong oxidizers such as potassium permanganate () and potassium dichromate (), and in the presence of potassium bromide (). These compounds are used in photography to bleach silver images, converting them to silver bromide that can either be fixed with thiosulfate or redeveloped to intensify the original image. Silver forms cyanide complexes (silver cyanide) that are soluble in water in the presence of an excess of cyanide ions. Silver cyanide solutions are used in electroplating of silver.


title: Silver

text: The common oxidation states of silver are (in order of commonness): +1 (the most stable state; for example, silver nitrate, AgNO); +2 (highly oxidising; for example, silver(II) fluoride, AgF); and even very rarely +3 (extreme oxidising; for example, potassium tetrafluoroargentate(III), KAgF). The +3 state requires very strong oxidising agents to attain, such as fluorine or peroxodisulfate, and some silver(III) compounds react with atmospheric moisture and attack glass. Indeed, silver(III) fluoride is usually obtained by reacting silver or silver monofluoride with the strongest known oxidizing agent, krypton difluoride.


title: Silver

text: Silver and gold have rather low chemical affinities for oxygen, lower than copper, and it is therefore expected that silver oxides are thermally quite unstable. Soluble silver(I) salts precipitate dark-brown silver(I) oxide, AgO, upon the addition of alkali. (The hydroxide AgOH exists only in solution; otherwise it spontaneously decomposes to the oxide.) Silver(I) oxide is very easily reduced to metallic silver, and decomposes to silver and oxygen above 160 °C. This and other silver(I) compounds may be oxidized by the strong oxidizing agent peroxodisulfate to black AgO, a mixed silver(I,III) oxide of formula AgAgO. Some other mixed oxides with silver in non-integral oxidation states, namely AgO and AgO, are also known, as is AgO which behaves as a metallic conductor.


title: Silver

text: Silver(I) sulfide, AgS, is very readily formed from its constituent elements and is the cause of the black tarnish on some old silver objects. It may also be formed from the reaction of hydrogen sulfide with silver metal or aqueous Ag ions. Many non-stoichiometric selenides and tellurides are known; in particular, AgTe is a low-temperature superconductor.


title: Silver

text: The only known dihalide of silver is the difluoride, AgF, which can be obtained from the elements under heat. A strong yet thermally stable and therefore safe fluorinating agent, silver(II) fluoride is often used to synthesize hydrofluorocarbons.


title: Silver

text: In stark contrast to this, all four silver(I) halides are known. The fluoride, chloride, and bromide have the sodium chloride structure, but the iodide has three known stable forms at different temperatures; that at room temperature is the cubic zinc blende structure. They can all be obtained by the direct reaction of their respective elements. As the halogen group is descended, the silver halide gains more and more covalent character, solubility decreases, and the color changes from the white chloride to the yellow iodide as the energy required for ligand-metal charge transfer (XAg → XAg) decreases. The fluoride is anomalous, as the fluoride ion is so small that it has a considerable solvation energy and hence is highly water-soluble and forms di- and tetrahydrates. The other three silver halides are highly insoluble in aqueous solutions and are very commonly used in gravimetric analytical methods. All four are photosensitive (though the monofluoride is so only to ultraviolet light), especially the bromide and iodide which photodecompose to silver metal, and thus were used in traditional photography. The reaction involved is:


title: Silver

text: The process is not reversible because the silver atom liberated is typically found at a crystal defect or an impurity site, so that the electron's energy is lowered enough that it is "trapped".


title: Silver

text: White silver nitrate, AgNO, is a versatile precursor to many other silver compounds, especially the halides, and is much less sensitive to light. It was once called "lunar caustic" because silver was called "luna" by the ancient alchemists, who believed that silver was associated with the Moon. It is often used for gravimetric analysis, exploiting the insolubility of the heavier silver halides which it is a common precursor to. Silver nitrate is used in many ways in organic synthesis, e.g. for deprotection and oxidations. Ag binds alkenes reversibly, and silver nitrate has been used to separate mixtures of alkenes by selective absorption. The resulting adduct can be decomposed with ammonia to release the free alkene.


title: Silver

text: Yellow silver carbonate, AgCO can be easily prepared by reacting aqueous solutions of sodium carbonate with a deficiency of silver nitrate. Its principal use is for the production of silver powder for use in microelectronics. It is reduced with formaldehyde, producing silver free of alkali metals:


title: Silver

text: Silver carbonate is also used as a reagent in organic synthesis such as the Koenigs-Knorr reaction. In the Fétizon oxidation, silver carbonate on celite acts as an oxidising agent to form lactones from diols. It is also employed to convert alkyl bromides into alcohols.


title: Silver

text: Silver fulminate, AgCNO, a powerful, touch-sensitive explosive used in percussion caps, is made by reaction of silver metal with nitric acid in the presence of ethanol. Other dangerously explosive silver compounds are silver azide, AgN, formed by reaction of silver nitrate with sodium azide, and silver acetylide, AgC, formed when silver reacts with acetylene gas in ammonia solution. In its most characteristic reaction, silver azide decomposes explosively, releasing nitrogen gas: given the photosensitivity of silver salts, this behaviour may be induced by shining a light on its crystals.


title: Silver

text: Silver complexes tend to be similar to those of its lighter homologue copper. Silver(III) complexes tend to be rare and very easily reduced to the more stable lower oxidation states, though they are slightly more stable than those of copper(III). For instance, the square planar periodate [Ag(IOOH)] and tellurate [Ag{TeO(OH)}] complexes may be prepared by oxidising silver(I) with alkaline peroxodisulfate. The yellow diamagnetic [AgF] is much less stable, fuming in moist air and reacting with glass.


title: Silver

text: Silver(II) complexes are more common. Like the valence isoelectronic copper(II) complexes, they are usually square planar and paramagnetic, which is increased by the greater field splitting for 4d electrons than for 3d electrons. Aqueous Ag, produced by oxidation of Ag by ozone, is a very strong oxidising agent, even in acidic solutions: it is stabilized in phosphoric acid due to complex formation. Peroxodisulfate oxidation is generally necessary to give the more stable complexes with heterocyclic amines, such as [Ag(py)] and [Ag(bipy)]: these are stable provided the counterion cannot reduce the silver back to the +1 oxidation state. [AgF] is also known in its violet barium salt, as are some silver(II) complexes with "N"- or "O"-donor ligands such as pyridine carboxylates.


title: Silver

text: By far the most important oxidation state for silver in complexes is +1. The Ag cation is diamagnetic, like its homologues Cu and Au, as all three have closed-shell electron configurations with no unpaired electrons: its complexes are colourless provided the ligands are not too easily polarized such as I. Ag forms salts with most anions, but it is reluctant to coordinate to oxygen and thus most of these salts are insoluble in water: the exceptions are the nitrate, perchlorate, and fluoride. The tetracoordinate tetrahedral aqueous ion [Ag(HO)] is known, but the characteristic geometry for the Ag cation is 2-coordinate linear. For example, silver chloride dissolves readily in excess aqueous ammonia to form [Ag(NH)]; silver salts are dissolved in photography due to the formation of the thiosulfate complex [Ag(SO)]; and cyanide extraction for silver (and gold) works by the formation of the complex [Ag(CN)]. Silver cyanide forms the linear polymer {Ag–C≡N→Ag–C≡N→}; silver thiocyanate has a similar structure, but forms a zigzag instead because of the sp-hybridized sulfur atom. Chelating ligands are unable to form linear complexes and thus silver(I) complexes with them tend to form polymers; a few exceptions exist, such as the near-tetrahedral diphosphine and diarsine complexes [Ag(L–L)].


title: Silver

text: Under standard conditions, silver does not form simple carbonyls, due to the weakness of the Ag–C bond. A few are known at very low temperatures around 6–15 K, such as the green, planar paramagnetic Ag(CO), which dimerizes at 25–30 K, probably by forming Ag–Ag bonds. Additionally, the silver carbonyl [Ag(CO)] [B(OTeF)] is known. Polymeric AgLX complexes with alkenes and alkynes are known, but their bonds are thermodynamically weaker than even those of the platinum complexes (though they are formed more readily than those of the analogous gold complexes): they are also quite unsymmetrical, showing the weak "π" bonding in group 11. Ag–C "σ" bonds may also be formed by silver(I), like copper(I) and gold(I), but the simple alkyls and aryls of silver(I) are even less stable than those of copper(I) (which tend to explode under ambient conditions). For example, poor thermal stability is reflected in the relative decomposition temperatures of AgMe (−50 °C) and CuMe (−15 °C) as well as those of PhAg (74 °C) and PhCu (100 °C).


title: Silver

text: The C–Ag bond is stabilized by perfluoroalkyl ligands, for example in AgCF(CF). Alkenylsilver compounds are also more stable than their alkylsilver counterparts. Silver-NHC complexes are easily prepared, and are commonly used to prepare other NHC complexes by displacing labile ligands. For example, the reaction of the bis(NHC)silver(I) complex with bis(acetonitrile)palladium dichloride or chlorido(dimethyl sulfide)gold(I):


title: Silver

text: Silver forms alloys with most other elements on the periodic table. The elements from groups 1–3, except for hydrogen, lithium, and beryllium, are very miscible with silver in the condensed phase and form intermetallic compounds; those from groups 4–9 are only poorly miscible; the elements in groups 10–14 (except boron and carbon) have very complex Ag–M phase diagrams and form the most commercially important alloys; and the remaining elements on the periodic table have no consistency in their Ag–M phase diagrams. By far the most important such alloys are those with copper: most silver used for coinage and jewellery is in reality a silver–copper alloy, and the eutectic mixture is used in vacuum brazing. The two metals are completely miscible as liquids but not as solids; their importance in industry comes from the fact that their properties tend to be suitable over a wide range of variation in silver and copper concentration, although most useful alloys tend to be richer in silver than the eutectic mixture (71.9% silver and 28.1% copper by weight, and 60.1% silver and 28.1% copper by atom).


title: Silver

text: Most other binary alloys are of little use: for example, silver–gold alloys are too soft and silver–cadmium alloys too toxic. Ternary alloys have much greater importance: dental amalgams are usually silver–tin–mercury alloys, silver–copper–gold alloys are very important in jewellery (usually on the gold-rich side) and have a vast range of hardnesses and colours, silver–copper–zinc alloys are useful as low-melting brazing alloys, and silver–cadmium–indium (involving three adjacent elements on the periodic table) is useful in nuclear reactors because of its high thermal neutron capture cross-section, good conduction of heat, mechanical stability, and resistance to corrosion in hot water.


title: Silver

text: The word "silver" appears in Old English in various spellings, such as "seolfor" and "siolfor". It is cognate with Old High German "silabar"; Gothic "silubr"; or Old Norse "silfr", all ultimately deriving from Proto-Germanic "*silubra". The Balto-Slavic words for silver are rather similar to the Germanic ones (e.g. Russian серебро ["serebró"], Polish "srebro", Lithuanian "sidãbras"), as is the Celtiberian form "silabur". They may have a common Indo-European origin, although their morphology rather suggest a non-Indo-European "Wanderwort". Some scholars have thus proposed a Paleo-Hispanic origin, pointing to the Basque form "zilharr" as an evidence.


title: Silver

text: The chemical symbol Ag is from the Latin word for "silver", "argentum" (compare Ancient Greek ἄργυρος, "árgyros"), from the Proto-Indo-European root *"h₂erǵ-" (formerly reconstructed as "*arǵ-"), meaning "white" or "shining". This was the usual Proto-Indo-European word for the metal, whose reflexes are missing in Germanic and Balto-Slavic.


title: Silver

text: Silver was one of the seven metals of antiquity that were known to prehistoric humans and whose discovery is thus lost to history. In particular, the three metals of group 11, copper, silver, and gold, occur in the elemental form in nature and were probably used as the first primitive forms of money as opposed to simple bartering. However, unlike copper, silver did not lead to the growth of metallurgy on account of its low structural strength, and was more often used ornamentally or as money. Since silver is more reactive than gold, supplies of native silver were much more limited than those of gold. For example, silver was more expensive than gold in Egypt until around the fifteenth century BC: the Egyptians are thought to have separated gold from silver by heating the metals with salt, and then reducing the silver chloride produced to the metal.


title: Silver

text: The situation changed with the discovery of cupellation, a technique that allowed silver metal to be extracted from its ores. While slag heaps found in Asia Minor and on the islands of the Aegean Sea indicate that silver was being separated from lead as early as the 4th millennium BC, and one of the earliest silver extraction centres in Europe was Sardinia in the early Chalcolithic period, these techniques did not spread widely until later,


title: Silver

text: when it spread throughout the region and beyond. The origins of silver production in India, China, and Japan were almost certainly equally ancient, but are not well-documented due to their great age.


title: Silver

text: When the Phoenicians first came to what is now Spain, they obtained so much silver that they could not fit it all on their ships, and as a result used silver to weight their anchors instead of lead. By the time of the Greek and Roman civilizations, silver coins were a staple of the economy: the Greeks were already extracting silver from galena by the 7th century BC, and the rise of Athens was partly made possible by the nearby silver mines at Laurium, from which they extracted about 30 tonnes a year from 600 to 300 BC. The stability of the Roman currency relied to a high degree on the supply of silver bullion, mostly from Spain, which Roman miners produced on a scale unparalleled before the discovery of the New World. Reaching a peak production of 200 tonnes per year, an estimated silver stock of 10,000 tonnes circulated in the Roman economy in the middle of the second century AD, five to ten times larger than the combined amount of silver available to medieval Europe and the Abbasid Caliphate around AD 800. The Romans also recorded the extraction of silver in central and northern Europe in the same time period. This production came to a nearly complete halt with the fall of the Roman Empire, not to resume until the time of Charlemagne: by then, tens of thousands of tonnes of silver had already been extracted.


title: Silver

text: Central Europe became the centre of silver production during the Middle Ages, as the Mediterranean deposits exploited by the ancient civilisations had been exhausted. Silver mines were opened in Bohemia, Saxony, Erzgebirge, Alsace, the Lahn region, Siegerland, Silesia, Hungary, Norway, Steiermark, Schwaz, and the southern Black Forest. Most of these ores were quite rich in silver and could simply be separated by hand from the remaining rock and then smelted; some deposits of native silver were also encountered. Many of these mines were soon exhausted, but a few of them remained active until the Industrial Revolution, before which the world production of silver was around a meagre 50 tonnes per year. In the Americas, high temperature silver-lead cupellation technology was developed by pre-Inca civilizations as early as AD 60–120; silver deposits in India, China, Japan, and pre-Columbian America continued to be mined during this time.


title: Silver

text: With the discovery of America and the plundering of silver by the Spanish conquistadors, Central and South America became the dominant producers of silver until around the beginning of the 18th century, particularly Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina: the last of these countries later took its name from that of the metal that composed so much of its mineral wealth. The silver trade gave way to a global network of exchange. As one historian put it, silver "went round the world and made the world go round." Much of this silver ended up in the hands of the Chinese. A Portuguese merchant in 1621 noted that silver "wanders throughout all the world... before flocking to China, where it remains as if at its natural center." Still, much of it went to Spain, allowing Spanish rulers to pursue military and political ambitions in both Europe and the Americas. "New World mines," concluded several historians, "supported the Spanish empire."


title: Silver

text: In the 19th century, primary production of silver moved to North America, particularly Canada, Mexico, and Nevada in the United States: some secondary production from lead and zinc ores also took place in Europe, and deposits in Siberia and the Russian Far East as well as in Australia were mined. Poland emerged as an important producer during the 1970s after the discovery of copper deposits that were rich in silver, before the centre of production returned to the Americas the following decade. Today, Peru and Mexico are still among the primary silver producers, but the distribution of silver production around the world is quite balanced and about one-fifth of the silver supply comes from recycling instead of new production.


title: Silver

text: Silver plays a certain role in mythology and has found various usage as a metaphor and in folklore. The Greek poet Hesiod's "Works and Days" (lines 109–201) lists different ages of man named after metals like gold, silver, bronze and iron to account for successive ages of humanity. Ovid's "Metamorphoses" contains another retelling of the story, containing an illustration of silver's metaphorical use of signifying the second-best in a series, better than bronze but worse than gold:


title: Silver

text: In folklore, silver was commonly thought to have mystic powers: for example, a bullet cast from silver is often supposed in such folklore the only weapon that is effective against a werewolf, witch, or other monsters. From this the idiom of a silver bullet developed into figuratively referring to any simple solution with very high effectiveness or almost miraculous results, as in the widely discussed software engineering paper "No Silver Bullet". Other powers attributed to silver include detection of poison and facilitation of passage into the mythical realm of fairies.


title: Silver

text: Silver production has also inspired figurative language. Clear references to cupellation occur throughout the Old Testament of the Bible, such as in Jeremiah's rebuke to Judah: "The bellows are burned, the lead is consumed of the fire; the founder melteth in vain: for the wicked are not plucked away. Reprobate silver shall men call them, because the Lord hath rejected them." (Jeremiah 6:19–20) Jeremiah was also aware of sheet silver, exemplifying the malleability and ductility of the metal: "Silver spread into plates is brought from Tarshish, and gold from Uphaz, the work of the workman, and of the hands of the founder: blue and purple is their clothing: they are all the work of cunning men." (Jeremiah 10:9)


title: Silver

text: Silver also has more negative cultural meanings: the idiom thirty pieces of silver, referring to a reward for betrayal, references the bribe Judas Iscariot is said in the New Testament to have taken from Jewish leaders in Jerusalem to turn Jesus of Nazareth over to soldiers of the high priest Caiaphas. Ethically, silver also symbolizes greed and degradation of consciousness; this is the negative aspect, the perverting of its value.


title: Silver

text: The abundance of silver in the Earth's crust is 0.08 parts per million, almost exactly the same as that of mercury. It mostly occurs in sulfide ores, especially acanthite and argentite, AgS. Argentite deposits sometimes also contain native silver when they occur in reducing environments, and when in contact with salt water they are converted to chlorargyrite (including horn silver), AgCl, which is prevalent in Chile and New South Wales. Most other silver minerals are silver pnictides or chalcogenides; they are generally lustrous semiconductors. Most true silver deposits, as opposed to argentiferous deposits of other metals, came from Tertiary period vulcanism.


title: Silver

text: The principal sources of silver are the ores of copper, copper-nickel, lead, and lead-zinc obtained from Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, China, Australia, Chile, Poland and Serbia. Peru, Bolivia and Mexico have been mining silver since 1546, and are still major world producers. Top silver-producing mines are Cannington (Australia), Fresnillo (Mexico), San Cristóbal (Bolivia), Antamina (Peru), Rudna (Poland), and Penasquito (Mexico). Top near-term mine development projects through 2015 are Pascua Lama (Chile), Navidad (Argentina), Jaunicipio (Mexico), Malku Khota (Bolivia), and Hackett River (Canada). In Central Asia, Tajikistan is known to have some of the largest silver deposits in the world.


title: Silver

text: Silver is usually found in nature combined with other metals, or in minerals that contain silver compounds, generally in the form of sulfides such as galena (lead sulfide) or cerussite (lead carbonate). So the primary production of silver requires the smelting and then cupellation of argentiferous lead ores, a historically important process. Lead melts at 327 °C, lead oxide at 888 °C and silver melts at 960 °C. To separate the silver, the alloy is melted again at the high temperature of 960 °C to 1000 °C in an oxidizing environment. The lead oxidises to lead monoxide, then known as litharge, which captures the oxygen from the other metals present. The liquid lead oxide is removed or absorbed by capillary action into the hearth linings.


title: Silver

text: Today, silver metal is primarily produced instead as a secondary byproduct of electrolytic refining of copper, lead, and zinc, and by application of the Parkes process on lead bullion from ore that also contains silver. In such processes, silver follows the non-ferrous metal in question through its concentration and smelting, and is later purified out. For example, in copper production, purified copper is electrolytically deposited on the cathode, while the less reactive precious metals such as silver and gold collect under the anode as the so-called "anode slime". This is then separated and purified of base metals by treatment with hot aerated dilute sulfuric acid and heating with lime or silica flux, before the silver is purified to over 99.9% purity via electrolysis in nitrate solution.


title: Silver

text: Commercial-grade fine silver is at least 99.9% pure, and purities greater than 99.999% are available. In 2014, Mexico was the top producer of silver (5,000 tonnes or 18.7% of the world's total of 26,800 t), followed by China (4,060 t) and Peru (3,780 t).


title: Silver

text: Silver concentration is low in seawater (pmol/L). Levels vary by depth and between water bodies. Dissolved silver concentrations range from 0.3 pmol/L in coastal surface waters to 22.8 pmol/L in pelagic deep waters. Analyzing the presence and dynamics of silver in marine environments is difficult due to these particularly low concentrations and complex interactions in the environment. Although a rare trace metal, concentrations are greatly impacted by fluvial, aeolian, atmospheric, and upwelling inputs, as well as anthropogenic inputs via discharge, waste disposal, and emissions from industrial companies. Other internal processes such as decomposition of organic matter may be a source of dissolved silver in deeper waters, which feeds into some surface waters through upwelling and vertical mixing.


title: Silver

text: In the Atlantic and Pacific, silver concentrations are minimal at the surface but rise in deeper waters. Silver is taken up by plankton in the photic zone, remobilized with depth, and enriched in deep waters. Silver is transported from the Atlantic to the other oceanic water masses. In North Pacific waters, silver is remobilized at a slower rate and increasingly enriched compared to deep Atlantic waters. Silver has increasing concentrations that follow the major oceanic conveyor belt that cycles water and nutrients from the North Atlantic to the South Atlantic to the North Pacific.


title: Silver

text: There is not an extensive amount of data focused on how marine life is affected by silver despite the likely deleterious effects it could have on organisms through bioaccumulation, association with particulate matters, and sorption. Not until about 1984 did scientists begin to understand the chemical characteristics of silver and the potential toxicity. In fact, mercury is the only other trace metal that surpasses the toxic effects of silver; however, the full extent of silver toxicity is not expected in oceanic conditions because of its ability to transfer into nonreactive biological compounds.


title: Silver

text: In one study, the presence of excess ionic silver and silver nanoparticles caused bioaccumulation effects on zebrafish organs and altered the chemical pathways within their gills. In addition, very early experimental studies demonstrated how the toxic effects of silver fluctuate with salinity and other parameters, as well as between life stages and different species such as finfish, molluscs, and crustaceans. Another study found raised concentrations of silver in the muscles and liver of dolphins and whales, indicating pollution of this metal within recent decades. Silver is not an easy metal for an organism to eliminate and elevated concentrations can cause death.


title: Silver

text: The earliest known coins were minted in the kingdom of Lydia in Asia Minor around 600 BC. The coins of Lydia were made of electrum, which is a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver, that was available within the territory of Lydia. Since that time, silver standards, in which the standard economic unit of account is a fixed weight of silver, have been widespread throughout the world until the 20th century. Notable silver coins through the centuries include the Greek drachma, the Roman denarius, the Islamic dirham, the karshapana from ancient India and rupee from the time of the Mughal Empire (grouped with copper and gold coins to create a trimetallic standard), and the Spanish dollar.


title: Silver

text: The ratio between the amount of silver used for coinage and that used for other purposes has fluctuated greatly over time; for example, in wartime, more silver tends to have been used for coinage to finance the war.


title: Silver

text: Today, silver bullion has the ISO 4217 currency code XAG, one of only four precious metals to have one (the others being palladium, platinum, and gold). Silver coins are produced from cast rods or ingots, rolled to the correct thickness, heat-treated, and then used to cut blanks from. These blanks are then milled and minted in a coining press; modern coining presses can produce 8000 silver coins per hour.


title: Silver

text: Silver prices are normally quoted in troy ounces. One troy ounce is equal to . The London silver fix is published every working day at noon London time. This price is determined by several major international banks and is used by London bullion market members for trading that day. Prices are most commonly shown as the United States dollar (USD), the Pound sterling (GBP), and the Euro (EUR).


title: Silver

text: The major use of silver besides coinage throughout most of history was in the manufacture of jewellery and other general-use items, and this continues to be a major use today. Examples include table silver for cutlery, for which silver is highly suited due to its antibacterial properties. Western concert flutes are usually plated with or made out of sterling silver; in fact, most silverware is only silver-plated rather than made out of pure silver; the silver is normally put in place by electroplating. Silver-plated glass (as opposed to metal) is used for mirrors, vacuum flasks, and Christmas tree decorations.


title: Silver

text: Because pure silver is very soft, most silver used for these purposes is alloyed with copper, with finenesses of 925/1000, 835/1000, and 800/1000 being common. One drawback is the easy tarnishing of silver in the presence of hydrogen sulfide and its derivatives. Including precious metals such as palladium, platinum, and gold gives resistance to tarnishing but is quite costly; base metals like zinc, cadmium, silicon, and germanium do not totally prevent corrosion and tend to affect the lustre and colour of the alloy. Electrolytically refined pure silver plating is effective at increasing resistance to tarnishing. The usual solutions for restoring the lustre of tarnished silver are dipping baths that reduce the silver sulfide surface to metallic silver, and cleaning off the layer of tarnish with a paste; the latter approach also has the welcome side effect of polishing the silver concurrently.


title: Silver

text: In medicine, silver is incorporated into wound dressings and used as an antibiotic coating in medical devices. Wound dressings containing silver sulfadiazine or silver nanomaterials are used to treat external infections. Silver is also used in some medical applications, such as urinary catheters (where tentative evidence indicates it reduces catheter-related urinary tract infections) and in endotracheal breathing tubes (where evidence suggests it reduces ventilator-associated pneumonia). The silver ion is bioactive and in sufficient concentration readily kills bacteria "in vitro". Silver ions interfere with enzymes in the bacteria that transport nutrients, form structures, and synthesise cell walls; these ions also bond with the bacteria's genetic material. Silver and silver nanoparticles are used as an antimicrobial in a variety of industrial, healthcare, and domestic application: for example, infusing clothing with nanosilver particles thus allows them to stay odourless for longer. Bacteria can, however, develop resistance to the antimicrobial action of silver. Silver compounds are taken up by the body like mercury compounds, but lack the toxicity of the latter. Silver and its alloys are used in cranial surgery to replace bone, and silver–tin–mercury amalgams are used in dentistry. Silver diammine fluoride, the fluoride salt of a coordination complex with the formula [Ag(NH)]F, is a topical medicament (drug) used to treat and prevent dental caries (cavities) and relieve dentinal hypersensitivity.


title: Silver

text: Silver is very important in electronics for conductors and electrodes on account of its high electrical conductivity even when tarnished. Bulk silver and silver foils were used to make vacuum tubes, and continue to be used today in the manufacture of semiconductor devices, circuits, and their components. For example, silver is used in high quality connectors for RF, VHF, and higher frequencies, particularly in tuned circuits such as cavity filters where conductors cannot be scaled by more than 6%. Printed circuits and RFID antennas are made with silver paints, Powdered silver and its alloys are used in paste preparations for conductor layers and electrodes, ceramic capacitors, and other ceramic components.


title: Silver

text: Silver-containing brazing alloys are used for brazing metallic materials, mostly cobalt, nickel, and copper-based alloys, tool steels, and precious metals. The basic components are silver and copper, with other elements selected according to the specific application desired: examples include zinc, tin, cadmium, palladium, manganese, and phosphorus. Silver provides increased workability and corrosion resistance during usage.


title: Silver

text: Silver is useful in the manufacture of chemical equipment on account of its low chemical reactivity, high thermal conductivity, and being easily workable. Silver crucibles (alloyed with 0.15% nickel to avoid recrystallisation of the metal at red heat) are used for carrying out alkaline fusion. Copper and silver are also used when doing chemistry with fluorine. Equipment made to work at high temperatures is often silver-plated. Silver and its alloys with gold are used as wire or ring seals for oxygen compressors and vacuum equipment.


title: Silver

text: Silver metal is a good catalyst for oxidation reactions; in fact it is somewhat too good for most purposes, as finely divided silver tends to result in complete oxidation of organic substances to carbon dioxide and water, and hence coarser-grained silver tends to be used instead. For instance, 15% silver supported on α-AlO or silicates is a catalyst for the oxidation of ethylene to ethylene oxide at 230–270 °C. Dehydrogenation of methanol to formaldehyde is conducted at 600–720 °C over silver gauze or crystals as the catalyst, as is dehydrogenation of isopropanol to acetone. In the gas phase, glycol yields glyoxal and ethanol yields acetaldehyde, while organic amines are dehydrated to nitriles.


title: Silver

text: The photosensitivity of the silver halides allowed for their use in traditional photography, although digital photography, which does not use silver, is now dominant. The photosensitive emulsion used in black-and-white photography is a suspension of silver halide crystals in gelatin, possibly mixed in with some noble metal compounds for improved photosensitivity, developing, and . Colour photography requires the addition of special dye components and sensitisers, so that the initial black-and-white silver image couples with a different dye component. The original silver images are bleached off and the silver is then recovered and recycled. Silver nitrate is the starting material in all cases.


title: Silver

text: The use of silver nitrate and silver halides in photography has rapidly declined with the advent of digital technology. From the peak global demand for photographic silver in 1999 (267,000,000 troy ounces or 8,304.6 tonnes) the market contracted almost 70% by 2013.


title: Silver

text: Nanosilver particles, between 10 and 100 nanometres in size, are used in many applications. They are used in conductive inks for printed electronics, and have a much lower melting point than larger silver particles of micrometre size. They are also used medicinally in antibacterials and antifungals in much the same way as larger silver particles. In addition, according to the European Union Observatory for Nanomaterials (EUON), silver nanoparticles are used both in pigments, as well as cosmetics.


title: Silver

text: Pure silver metal is used as a food colouring. It has the E174 designation and is approved in the European Union. Traditional Indian and Pakistani dishes sometimes include decorative silver foil known as "vark", and in various other cultures, silver "dragée" are used to decorate cakes, cookies, and other dessert items.


title: Silver

text: Photochromic lenses include silver halides, so that ultraviolet light in natural daylight liberates metallic silver, darkening the lenses. The silver halides are reformed in lower light intensities. Colourless silver chloride films are used in radiation detectors. Zeolite sieves incorporating Ag ions are used to desalinate seawater during rescues, using silver ions to precipitate chloride as silver chloride. Silver is also used for its antibacterial properties for water sanitisation, but the application of this is limited by limits on silver consumption. Colloidal silver is similarly used to disinfect closed swimming pools; while it has the advantage of not giving off a smell like hypochlorite treatments do, colloidal silver is not effective enough for more contaminated open swimming pools. Small silver iodide crystals are used in cloud seeding to cause rain.


title: Silver

text: Silver compounds have low toxicity compared to those of most other heavy metals, as they are poorly absorbed by the human body when ingested, and that which does get absorbed is rapidly converted to insoluble silver compounds or complexed by metallothionein. However, silver fluoride and silver nitrate are caustic and can cause tissue damage, resulting in gastroenteritis, diarrhoea, falling blood pressure, cramps, paralysis, and respiratory arrest. Animals repeatedly dosed with silver salts have been observed to experience anaemia, slowed growth, necrosis of the liver, and fatty degeneration of the liver and kidneys; rats implanted with silver foil or injected with colloidal silver have been observed to develop localised tumours. Parenterally admistered colloidal silver causes acute silver poisoning. Some waterborne species are particularly sensitive to silver salts and those of the other precious metals; in most situations, however, silver does not pose serious environmental hazards.


title: Silver

text: In large doses, silver and compounds containing it can be absorbed into the circulatory system and become deposited in various body tissues, leading to argyria, which results in a blue-grayish pigmentation of the skin, eyes, and mucous membranes. Argyria is rare, and so far as is known, does not otherwise harm a person's health, though it is disfiguring and usually permanent. Mild forms of argyria are sometimes mistaken for cyanosis, a blue tint on skin, caused by lack of oxygen.


title: Silver

text: Metallic silver, like copper, is an antibacterial agent, which was known to the ancients and first scientifically investigated and named the oligodynamic effect by Carl Nägeli. Silver ions damage the metabolism of bacteria even at such low concentrations as 0.01–0.1 milligrams per litre; metallic silver has a similar effect due to the formation of silver oxide. This effect is lost in the presence of sulfur due to the extreme insolubility of silver sulfide.


title: Silver

text: Some silver compounds are very explosive, such as the nitrogen compounds silver azide, silver amide, and silver fulminate, as well as silver acetylide, silver oxalate, and silver(II) oxide. They can explode on heating, force, drying, illumination, or sometimes spontaneously. To avoid the formation of such compounds, ammonia and acetylene should be kept away from silver equipment. Salts of silver with strongly oxidising acids such as silver chlorate and silver nitrate can explode on contact with materials that can be readily oxidised, such as organic compounds, sulfur and soot.


title: Never Gonna Give You Up

text: "Never Gonna Give You Up" is the debut single recorded by English singer and songwriter Rick Astley, released on 27 July 1987. It is one of Astley's most famous songs. It was written and produced by Stock Aitken Waterman, and was released as the first single from Astley's debut album, "Whenever You Need Somebody" (1987). The song was a worldwide number-one hit, initially in the United Kingdom in 1987, where it stayed at the top of the chart for five weeks and was the best-selling single of that year. It eventually topped the charts in 25 countries, including the United States and West Germany. The song won Best British Single at the 1988 Brit Awards.


title: Never Gonna Give You Up

text: The song is considered Astley's signature song and it is often played at the end of his live concerts. The music video for the song has become the basis for the "Rickrolling" Internet meme, in which a user expecting entirely unrelated content is shown the video. In 2008, Astley won the MTV Europe Music Award for Best Act Ever with the song, as a result of collective voting from thousands of people on the Internet, due to the Rickrolling meme.


title: Never Gonna Give You Up

text: In 2019, Astley recorded and released a 'Pianoforte' version of the song for his album "The Best of Me", which features a new piano arrangement.


title: Never Gonna Give You Up

text: "Never Gonna Give You Up" was recorded at PWL Studios in South London, England. The song's basslines were produced using a Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer, while a Linn 9000 was used for the drums and sequencing. Other equipment used included a Roland Juno 106 analog synthesizer, and Yamaha Rev5 and Rev7 reverberators.


title: Never Gonna Give You Up

text: Mike Stock stated that the Colonel Abrams hit "Trapped" (1985) was a big influence on "Never Gonna Give You Up", saying: "For Rick Astley's song I didn't want it to sound like Kylie or Bananarama so I looked at the Colonel Abrams track 'Trapped' and recreated that syncopated bassline in a way that suited our song."


title: Never Gonna Give You Up

text: The title and concept for the song were suggested by Pete Waterman after Astley spoke to him of his devotion to his then girlfriend, with the song's tune, chords and lyrics then composed by Mike Stock and Matt Aitken. Initial mixing was done by Phil Harding, with the song's distinctive synthetic string and brass lines later added by Fairlight operator Ian Curnow. The final mix was provided by PWL remixer Pete Hammond, who made the vocals more prominent. His completed extended mix was edited down by Stock and Aitken to become the radio version.


title: Never Gonna Give You Up

text: The music video for "Never Gonna Give You Up" was directed by Simon West. It was filmed in London, largely around the London Borough of Harrow. Since being uploaded to YouTube on 24 October 2009, the video has received over 1.3 billion views(1.311) and 15 million likes(15.57); it surpassed the 1 billion views milestone on 28 July 2021, 34 years and 1 day after the song was released. It gets over 456K daily views and over 13.6M monthly views.


title: Never Gonna Give You Up

text: On 12 March 1988, "Never Gonna Give You Up" reached number one in the American "Billboard" Hot 100 chart after having been played by resident DJ, Larry Levan, at the Paradise Garage in 1987. The single topped the charts in 25 countries worldwide.


title: Never Gonna Give You Up

text: Assessing the status of the track as producers Stock Aitken Waterman's biggest and most enduring hit, composer Mike Stock confessed he struggled to completely understand why the song had struck such a chord, but suggested its massive success was down to a combination of the song, the singer, and the international clout of record label RCA.


title: Never Gonna Give You Up

text: "Time Out" listed "Never Gonna Give You Up" at number 33 in their "The 50 best '80s songs" list in 2018, adding, "Those synthesized strings, that thumping boots-and-pants beat, Astley's weirdly robust croon and his romantic-wooing-as-used-car-salesman pitch ('You wouldn't get this from any other guy')… It all adds up to three-and-a-half of the most effervescent minutes in the '80s canon."


title: Never Gonna Give You Up

text: The song was reportedly played as part of a psychological campaign to convince Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega to surrender during the United States invasion of Panama in 1989, along with other songs such as the Clash's cover of "I Fought the Law".


title: Never Gonna Give You Up

text: "Classic Pop" ranked the song number 4 in their list of "Top 40 Stock Aitken Waterman songs" in 2021.


title: Never Gonna Give You Up

text: The Emmy Award-winning sitcom "Ted Lasso" featured the song prominently in the season two episode "No Weddings and a Funeral", including a scene where Rebecca Welton (played by Hannah Waddingham) begins to sing it in the middle of her father's funeral. Astley himself commented of the episode, "Waddingham...did an amazing, incredible job. It was so emotional, so moving, so incredible. People have said they even cried (during) the church scene."


title: Never Gonna Give You Up

text: In August 2022, the CSAA Insurance Group, an insurer for the American Automobile Association, released a commercial featuring Rick Astley, with scenes recreated from the original "Never Gonna Give You Up" music video.


title: Never Gonna Give You Up

text: "Never Gonna Give You Up" is the subject of an Internet meme known as "rickrolling" involving misleading links (commonly shortened URLs) redirecting to the song's music video. Originally started by users on 4chan, by May 2007, the practice had achieved notoriety on the Internet, and it increased in popularity after its use as a 2008 April Fools' Day joke by various media companies and websites—including YouTube, which rickrolled all of its featured videos on that day—allowing people to easily rickroll their friends' devices. "I think it's just one of those odd things where something gets picked up and people run with it", Astley told the "Los Angeles Times" in late March 2008, adding: "That's what's brilliant about the Internet."


title: Never Gonna Give You Up

text: Astley also appeared in the 2008 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, interrupting a song performed by those on a float promoting the Cartoon Network programme "Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends" with a lipsynched performance of "Never Gonna Give You Up".


title: Never Gonna Give You Up

text: There were reports that despite the video garnering millions of hits on YouTube, Astley earned almost no money from the online phenomenon, receiving only $12 in royalties from YouTube for his performance share as of August 2010. In 2016, Astley said he never bothered to figure out how much money he earned from YouTube and clarified that he had also been paid "a chunk of money" by Virgin to appear in a commercial and for an appearance at the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade.


title: Never Gonna Give You Up

text: On 29 July 2021, to celebrate 1 billion views on YouTube, Rick Astley released a limited and numbered 7" blue vinyl. Only 2,500 were signed and sold.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Though the terms "sex" and "gender" have been used interchangeably since at least the fourteenth century, in contemporary academic literature they usually have distinct meanings. "Sex" generally refers to an organism's biological sex, while "gender" usually refers to either social roles based on the sex of a person (gender role) or personal identification of one's own gender based on an internal awareness (gender identity). While in ordinary speech, the terms "sex" and "gender" are often used interchangeably, most contemporary social scientists, behavioral scientists and biologists, many legal systems and government bodies, and intergovernmental agencies such as the WHO make a distinction between gender and sex.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: In most individuals, the various biological determinants of sex are congruent, and consistent with the individual's gender identity, but in some circumstances, an individual's assigned sex and gender do not align, and the person may be transgender. Also in some cases, an individual may have sex characteristics that complicate sex assignment, and the person may be intersex.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Sexologist John Money is often regarded as the first to introduce a distinction between biological sex and gender identity/role in 1955, although Madison Bentley had already defined gender as the "socialized obverse of sex" a decade earlier. As originally conceived by Money, gender and sex are analysed together as a single category including both biological and social elements, but later work by Robert Stoller separated the two, designating sex and gender as biological and cultural categories, respectively. Before the work of Bentley, Money and Stoller, the word gender was only regularly used to refer to grammatical categories.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Anisogamy, or the size differences of gametes (sex cells), is the defining feature of the two sexes. According to biologist Michael Majerus there is no other universal difference between males and females.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: By definition, males are organisms that produce small, mobile gametes (sperm); while females are organisms that produce large and generally immobile gametes (ova or eggs). Richard Dawkins stated that it is possible to interpret all the differences between the sexes as stemming from this single difference in gametes.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Bhargava et al. (2021) note that the terms sex and gender are not, and should not be used as, interchangeable terms. They state that "[s]ex is dichotomous, with sex determination in the fertilized zygote stemming from unequal expression of sex chromosomal genes." In contrast, gender is seen as including "perception of the individual as male, female, or other, both by the individual and by society". The authors differentiate between "sex differences", caused by biological factors, and "gender differences", which "reflect a complex interplay of psychological, environmental, cultural, and biological factors". Gender identity is thus seen as a "psychological concept that refers to an individual's self-perception".


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Other studies have noted that, while there is some tentative evidence for a potential genetic, neuroanatomical, and hormonal basis for gender identity, the specific biological mechanisms involved have not yet been demonstrated.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: The term "sex differences" is typically applied to sexually dimorphic traits that are hypothesized to be evolved consequences of sexual selection. For example, the human "sex difference" in height is a consequence of sexual selection, while the "gender difference" typically seen in head hair length (women with longer hair) is not. Scientific research shows an individual's sex influences his or her behavior.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Sex differences are primarily caused by hormonal, genetic, and environmental factors. According to David Geary, the most fundamental sex difference in humans is the respective cost of reproduction, which is higher for females than males because of pregnancy and higher postnatal parental expenditure, resulting in different mating choice preferences for males and females.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Robert Stoller, whose work was the first to treat sex and gender as "two different orders of data", in his book "Sex and Gender: The Development of Masculinity and Femininity", uses the term 'sex' to refer to the "male or the female sex and the component biological parts that determine whether one is a male or a female". He further states that, in order to determine sex, chromosomes, external genitalia, internal genitalia, gonads, hormonal states, secondary sex characteristics, and possibly also brain systems, must be analysed. He states that a person's sex is determined by "an algebraic sum of all these qualities", resulting in most people being classified as either 'male' or 'female'.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: The American Psychiatric Association states that sex is often described as a biological construct, "defined on an anatomical, hormonal, or genetic basis", and assigned at birth based on external genitalia.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: In "The Psychology of Gender", it is stated that "sex refers to the biological categories of female and male, categories distinguished by genes, chromosomes, and hormones." One of the (context dependant) guidelines used by the American Psychological Association states that "[t]here are a number of indicators of biological sex, including sex chromosomes, gonads, internal reproductive organs, and external genitalia."


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: According to Poston, "[s]ex refers mainly to biological characteristics, while gender refers mainly to sociological characteristics."


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: While noting that typically sex is assigned based on genital inspection at birth, Raine Dozier states that biological sex is "a complex constellation of chromosomes, hormones, genitalia, and reproductive organs."


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: In "The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory", Mary Hawkesworth and Lisa Disch note that feminist theorists have criticised the biological basis of sexual dimorphism. These theorists claim to have demonstrated that there are more than two naturally occurring sexes, and that, whether defined in terms of chromosomes, hormones, gonads, internal morphology, external genitalia, or secondary sex characteristics, "none of the typical correlates of biological sex conform to the demands of dichotomous classification", and that all these characteristics "fail to differentiate all men from all women or to provide a common core within each sex."


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: "Sex" is annotated as different from "gender" in the "Oxford English Dictionary", where it says "sex" "tends now to refer to biological differences, while gender often refers to cultural or social ones."


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Merriam-Webster defines sex as “either of the two major forms of individuals that occur in many species and that are distinguished respectively as female or male especially on the basis of their reproductive organs and structures.” or "the sum of the structural, functional, and sometimes behavioral characteristics of organisms that distinguish males and females". They also note that "[d]octors can alter the physical characteristics of sex, but bodily sex does not determine gender."


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: The World Health Organization (WHO) similarly states that "'sex' refers to the biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women" and that "'male' and 'female' are sex categories". According to the CDC people whose internal psychological experience differs from their assigned sex are transgender, transsexual, or non-binary.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Historian Thomas W. Laqueur suggests that from the Renaissance to the 18th century, there was a prevailing inclination among doctors towards the existence of only one biological sex (the one-sex theory, that women and men had the same fundamental reproductive structure). In some discourses, this view persisted into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Laqueur asserts that even at its peak, the one-sex model was supported among highly educated Europeans but is not known to have been a popular view nor one entirely agreed upon by doctors who treated the general population.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Scholars such as Joan Cadden and Michael Stolberg have criticized Laqueur's theory. Stolberg provides evidence to suggest that significant two-sex understandings of anatomy existed before Laqueur claims, arguing that sexual dimorphism was accepted as early as the sixteenth century. Joan Cadden has stated that 'one-sex' models of the body were already treated with scepticism in the ancient and medieval periods, and that Laqueur's periodisation of the shift from one-sex to two-sex was not as clear-cut as he made it out to be.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Sex and gender took center stage in America in the time of wars, when women had to work and men were at war.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: In the "Oxford English Dictionary", "gender" is defined as—in a modern and especially feminist use—"a euphemism for the sex of a human being, often intended to emphasize the social and cultural, as opposed to the biological, distinctions between the sexes", with the earliest example cited being from 1963. The "American Heritage Dictionary" (5th edition) states that "gender" may be defined by identity as "neither entirely female nor entirely male"; its "Usage Note" adds:


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Some people maintain that the word "sex" should be reserved for reference to the biological aspects of being male or female or to sexual activity, and that the word "gender" should be used only to refer to sociocultural roles. ... In some situations this distinction avoids ambiguity, as in "gender research", which is clear in a way that "sex research" is not. The distinction can be problematic, however. Linguistically, there isn't any real difference between "gender bias" and "sex bias", and it may seem contrived to insist that "sex" is incorrect in this instance.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: A working definition in use by the World Health Organization for its work is that "'[g]ender' refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women" and that "'masculine' and 'feminine' are gender categories." The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) used to use "gender" instead of "sex" when referring to physiological differences between male and female organisms. In 2011, they reversed their position on this and began using "sex "as the biological classification and "gender" as "a person's self representation as male or female, or how that person is responded to by social institutions based on the individual's gender presentation." "Gender" is also now commonly used even to refer to the physiology of non-human animals, without any implication of social gender roles.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: GLAAD (formerly the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) makes a distinction between sex and gender. In their Media Reference Guide for transgender issues, they describe sex as "the classification of people as male or female" at birth, based on bodily characteristics such as chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, and genitalia, and gender identity as "a person's internal, deeply held sense of their gender".


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: There is little general agreement among archaeologists about what can be accurately stated about gender identities, roles, and processes in the earliest human societies between 40,000 and 4,000 years before the present. There is a consensus that cultures at this time differentiated categories of people by 'gender', if this is defined as rules of behavior and roles based on sex. It is likely that the highly differentiated cultures of this period did not possess a single gender classification system, and instead their conception of gender may have been culture-specific, much like contemporary societies. It is feasible that some of the cultures of this era recognised up to five genders. For example, certain production roles, spiritual leaders, and healers may have been recognised as distinct genders. Whether or not social roles, such as religious leadership, were based upon gender, rather than age or skills, continues to be debated.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Some archaeological evidence suggests that gender, in the sense of social and behavioral distinctions, arose "at least by some 30,000 years ago". More evidence was found as of "26,000 years ago", at least at the archeological site Dolní Věstonice I and others, in what is now the Czech Republic. This is during the Upper Paleolithic time period.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: From the Mesolithic, various evidence suggests gender-differentiated tool use and diet in some cultures. By this time, it is likely that gender had become an important element of the organizational structure of these societies. Similar grave goods found in male and female high-status burials of this period, however, indicate that status was not simply based on gender. There is also much more evidence for the recognition of third and fourth genders from this period.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: In 2011, it was reported that an untypical Corded Ware burial, dated to between 2900 and 2500 B.C., had been discovered in Prague. The remains, believed to be anatomically male, were orientated in the same way as women's burials and were not accompanied by any gender-specific grave goods. Based on this the archaeologist Kamila Věšínová suggests that it was likely that this was an individual "with a different sexual orientation, homosexual or transsexual", while media reports heralded the discovery of the world's first "gay caveman". Archaeologists and biological anthropologists criticised media coverage as sensationalist, as well as criticising Věšínová's original statement, in which she conflates sex, gender, and sexuality, arguing that, although the burial might well represent a transgender individual, it does not necessarily mean that they had a different sexual orientation, or that their culture would have considered them 'homosexual'.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Turek notes that there are several examples of Corded Ware graves containing older biological males with typically female grave goods and body orientation. He suggests that "aged men may have decided to 'retire' as women for symbolic and practical reasons."


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: The historic meaning of "gender", ultimately derived from Latin "genus", was of "kind" or "variety". By the 20th century, this meaning was obsolete, and the word gender was almost always used to refer to grammatical categories, although there are a small number of examples of gender being used as a synonym for sex prior to the 20th century, and even as early as 1474. This changed in the early 1970s when the work of John Money, particularly the popular college textbook "Man & Woman, Boy & Girl", was embraced by feminist theory. This meaning of "gender" is now prevalent in the social sciences, although in many other contexts, "gender" includes "sex" or replaces it. As formulated by Money, gender is seen as an additional variable of sex. The later work of Robert Stoller, who innovated the term "gender identity", separated gender from sex as specifically cultural and biological categories, respectively, and treated them as "two different orders of data".


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Since the social sciences now distinguish between biologically defined "sex" and socially constructed "gender", the term "gender" is now also sometimes used by linguists to refer to social gender as well as grammatical gender. Some languages, such as German or Finnish, have no separate words for sex and gender. German, for example, uses "Biologisches Geschlecht" for biological sex, and "Soziales Geschlecht" for gender when making this distinction. Traditionally, however, a distinction has been made by linguists between "sex" and "gender", where "sex" refers primarily to the attributes of real-world entities – the relevant extralinguistic attributes being, for instance, male, female, non-personal, and indeterminate sex – and grammatical gender refers to a category, such as masculine, feminine, and neuter (frequently based on sex, but not exclusively so in all languages), that determines the agreement between nouns of different genders and associated words, such as articles and adjectives.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: "A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language", for instance, states Thus German, for instance, has three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Nouns referring to people and animals of known sex are "generally" referred to by nouns with the equivalent gender. Thus "Mann" (meaning man) is masculine and is associated with a masculine definite article to give "der Mann", while "Frau" (meaning woman) is feminine and is associated with a feminine definite article to give "die Frau". However the words for inanimate objects are commonly masculine (e.g. "der Tisch", the table) or feminine ("die Armbanduhr", the watch), and grammatical gender can diverge from biological sex; for instance the feminine noun "[die] Person" refers to a person of either sex, and the neuter noun "[das] Mädchen" means "the girl".


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: In modern English, there is no true grammatical gender in this sense, though the differentiation, for instance, between the pronouns "he" and "she", which in English refers to a difference in sex (or social gender), is sometimes referred to as a gender distinction. "A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language", for instance, refers to the semantically based "covert" gender (e.g. male and female, not masculine and feminine) of English nouns, as opposed to the "overt" gender of some English pronouns; this yields "nine" gender classes: male, female, dual, common, collective, higher male animal, higher female animal, lower animal, and inanimate, and these semantic gender classes affect the possible choices of pronoun for coreference to the real-life entity, e.g. "who" and "he" for "brother" but "which" and "it" or "she" for "cow".


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Used primarily in sociology and gender studies, ""doing gender"" is the socially constructed performance which takes place during routine human interactions, rather than as a set of essentialized qualities based on one's biological sex. The term first appeared in Candace West and Don Zimmerman's article "Doing Gender", published in the peer-reviewed journal, "Gender and Society". Originally written in 1977 but not published until 1987, "Doing Gender" is the most cited article published in "Gender and Society".


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: West and Zimmerman state that to understand gender as activity, it is important to differentiate between sex, sex category, and gender. They say that sex refers to the socially agreed upon specifications that establish one as male or female; sex is most often based on an individual's genitalia, or even their chromosomal typing before birth. They consider sex categories to be dichotomous, and that the person is placed in a sex category by exhibiting qualities exclusive to one category or the other. During most interactions, others situate a person's sex by identifying their sex category; however, they believe that a person's sex need not align with their sex category. West and Zimmerman maintain that the sex category is "established and sustained by the socially required identificatory displays that proclaim one's membership in one or the other category". Gender is the performance of attitudes and actions that are considered socially acceptable for one's sex category.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: West and Zimmerman suggested that the interactional process of "doing gender", combined with socially agreed upon gender expectations, holds individuals accountable for their gender performances. They also believe that while "doing gender" appropriately strengthens and promotes social structures based on the gender dichotomy, it inappropriately does not call into question these same social structures; only the individual actor is questioned. The concept of "doing gender" recognizes that gender both structures human interactions and is created through them.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: The current distinction between the terms "sex difference" versus "gender difference" has been criticized as misleading and counterproductive. These terms suggest that the behavior "of an individual" can be partitioned into separate biological and cultural factors. (However, behavioral differences between individuals can be statistically partitioned, as studied by behavioral genetics.) Instead, all behaviors are phenotypes—a complex interweaving of both nature and nurture.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Some psychologists have argued that the distinction between the terms "sex" and "gender" should be abandoned. The term "gender/sex" has been proposed, to emphasise the inseparability of biological, sociological, and cultural factors.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Diane Halpern, in her book "Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities," argued problems with "sex" vs. "gender" terminology:I cannot argue (in this book) that nature and nurture are inseparable and then... use different terms to refer to each class of variables. The ... biological manifestations of sex are confounded with psychosocial variables... The use of different terms to label these two types of contributions to human existence seemed inappropriate in light of the biopsychosocial position I have taken.She quotes Steven Pinker's summary of the problems with the terms sex and gender: "Part of it is a new prissiness—many people today are as squeamish about sexual dimorphism as the Victorians were about sex. But part of it is a limitation of the English language. The word 'sex' refers ambiguously to copulation and to sexual dimorphism..." Richard Lippa writes in "Gender, Nature and Nurture" that:Some researchers have argued that the word "sex" should be used to refer to (biological differences), whereas the word "gender" should be used to refer to (cultural differences). However, it is not at all clear the degree to which the differences between males and females are due to biological factors versus learned and cultural factors. Furthermore, indiscriminate use of the word "gender" tends to obscure the distinction between two different topics: (a) differences between males and females, and (b) individual differences in maleness and femaleness that occur within each sex.It has been suggested that more useful distinctions to make would be whether a behavioral difference between the sexes is first due to an evolved adaptation, then, if so, whether the adaptation is sexually dimorphic (different) or sexually monomorphic (the same in both sexes). The term "sex difference" could then be re-defined as between-sex differences that are manifestations of a sexually dimorphic adaptation (which is how many scientists use the term), while the term "gender difference" could be re-defined as due to differential socialization between the sexes of a monomorphic adaptation or byproduct. For example, greater male propensity toward physical aggression and risk taking would be termed a "sex difference;" the generally longer head hair length of females would be termed a "gender difference".


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Transgender people experience a mismatch between their gender identity or gender expression, and their assigned sex. Transgender people are sometimes called "transsexual" if they desire medical assistance to transition from one sex to another.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: "Transgender" is also an umbrella term: in addition to including people whose gender identity is the "opposite" of their assigned sex (trans men and trans women), it may include people who are not exclusively masculine or feminine (e.g. people who are genderqueer, non-binary, bigender, pangender, genderfluid, or agender). Other definitions of "transgender" also include people who belong to a third gender, or conceptualize transgender people as a third gender. Infrequently, the term "transgender" is defined very broadly to include cross-dressers.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Many feminists consider sex to only be a matter of biology and something that is not about social or cultural construction. For example, Lynda Birke, a feminist biologist, states that biology' is not seen as something which might change." However, the sex/gender distinction, also known as the Standard Model of Sex/Gender, is criticized by feminists who believe that there is undue emphasis placed on sex being a biological aspect, something that is fixed, natural, unchanging, and consisting of a male/female dichotomy. They believe the distinction fails to recognize anything outside the strictly male/female dichotomy and that it creates a barrier between those that fit as 'usual' and those that are 'unusual'. In Anne Fausto-Sterling's "Sexing the Body" she addresses the birth of children who are intersex. In this case, the standard model (sex/gender distinction) is seen as incorrect with regard to its notion that there are only two sexes, male and female. This is because "complete maleness and complete femaleness represent the extreme ends of a spectrum of possible body types." In other words, Fausto-Sterling argues that sex is a continuum.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Rather than viewing sex as a biological construct, there are feminists who view both sex and gender as a social construct. Fausto-Sterling believes that sex is socially constructed because nature does not decide on who is seen as a male or female physically. Rather, doctors decide what seems to be a "natural" sex for the inhabitants of society. In addition, the gender, behavior, actions, and appearance of males/females is also seen as socially constructed because codes of femininity and masculinity are chosen and deemed fit by society for societal usage.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Some feminist philosophers maintain that gender is totally undetermined by sex. See, for example, "The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution", a widely influential feminist text.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Mari Mikkola has put forward the "Trait/Norm Covariance Model" as a suggested replacement for the sex/gender distinction. Arguing that the sex/gender distinction, as formulated in contemporary feminism, implies that "doing away with gender should be feminism's political goal", the model divides by descriptive traits and evaluative norms, rather than by sex and gender. In this model, the term "descriptive traits" includes physical and anatomical traits, roles, and self-conceptions. So for example, "sex traits" (such as having ovaries) and "gender traits" (such as wearing make-up) are both subsumed under the category of descriptive traits, whereas "being feminine" is taken as an evaluative norm. Evaluative norms reflect how descriptive traits are evaluated by external observers, and certain descriptive traits may covary with certain evaluative norms. So for example the trait "having long hair" covaries strongly with feminine norms in some cultures, and less so in others.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Some feminists go further and argue that neither sex nor gender are strictly binary concepts. Judith Lorber, for instance, has stated that many conventional indicators of sex are not sufficient to demarcate male from female. For example, not all women lactate, while some men do. Similarly, Suzanne Kessler, in a 1990 survey of medical specialists in pediatric intersexuality, found out that when a child was born with XY chromosomes but ambiguous genitalia, its sex was often determined according to the size of its penis. Thus, even if the sex/gender distinction holds, Lorber and Kessler suggest that the dichotomies of female/male and masculine/feminine are not themselves exhaustive. Lorber writes, "My perspective goes beyond accepted feminist views that gender is a cultural overlay that modifies physiological sex differences ... I am arguing that bodies differ in many ways physiologically, but they are completely transformed by social practices to fit into the salient categories of a society, the most pervasive of which are 'female' and 'male' and 'women' and 'men.'"


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Moreover, Lorber has alleged that there exists more diversity within the individual categories of sex and gender—female/male and feminine/masculine, respectively—than between them. Hence, her fundamental claim is that both sex and gender are social constructions, rather than natural kinds.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: A comparable view has been advanced by Linda M.G. Zerilli, who writes regarding Monique Wittig, that she is "critical of the sex/gender dichotomy in much feminist theory because such a dichotomy leaves unquestioned the belief that there is a 'core of nature which resists examination, a relationship excluded from the social in the analysis—a relationship whose characteristic is ineluctability in culture, as well as in nature, and which is the heterosexual relationship.'" Building off Wittig, Judith Butler also criticizes the sex/gender distinction. Discussing sex as biological fact causes sex to appear natural and politically neutral. However, she writes, "Are the ostensibly natural facts of sex discursively produced in the service of other political and social interests?" Butler concludes, "If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called 'sex' is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all."


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: Governments, corporations, and organizations have varying recognition of, and approaches to the distinction between sex and gender.


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: The United States Census Bureau performs a census of the U.S. population every ten years. The questionnaire asks one question about sex, phrased as "What is person 1's sex?" and provides two checkboxes for the response, labeled "Male" and "Female". An explanatory page explains this question, using the term "sex": as "We ask one question about a person's sex to better understand demographic characteristics." The U.S. Census has had a question about sex on the census since the 1790 census. The U.S. Census recognizes the difference between the terms "sex" and "gender", the fact they are often confused or used interchangeably, and may differ across cultures and time, and explains that what the census attempts to measure, is "the sex composition of the population".


title: Sex and gender distinction

text: The Australian government provides guidelines on sex and gender to the public based on legislation passed in 2013. The guidelines recognize that "individuals may identify as a gender other than the sex they were assigned at birth, or may not identify as exclusively male or female". The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) gathers data about the population broken down in various ways, including by sex and gender. They require precise formulations of these terms, and go into some detail about sex recorded at birth, possible changes in sex assignment later in life, the meaning of "gender" and how it differs from "sex". ABS recognizes the popular confusion among the two terms, and provide descriptions of how to phrase surveys so as to elicit accurate responses for the purposes of the data they collect.