What is the worthiest single trait human beings possess?

Multi-faceted with mutiple personalities to boot.

In the immortal words of John Lennon, "Love, Love, Love."

Curiosity, well that is high on my list too. When curiosity is damped down, the human is at a low ebb.

I think a lot of what we are talking about goes together; to me the sequence is unworked out in terms of, say, Krebs cycle distinctness. Maybe it is similar, with feedback, and feedback inhibition affecting more production of (fill in the blank).

On wit, I think most are thinking of it as funning, when wit has a wider definition. Not that I've looked it up. Where did halfwit come from?? Not, half-funny. I still think of wit as perspective verbalized, and that verbalization may be just in the mind.

While I am keen on wit, I don't think it's the core feature.

Hmmm, I had a class once, by Meyer (forget his first name) on social history of the U.S. I got a C in it and also got allergic for the first time, that old room at the top of Haines Hall... sneeze city. That man spoke way above my head. It was a wakeup class though, and I'm glad I took it and got my lady's C. There was a book, American Humor, I think it was - that covered humor in a serious way. I could probably read that more easily now than I attempted then, working and going to school and not the brightest light.






Er, re a C, that was normal then. It was pre-'65.

Osso and Heeven, you have me thinking about curiosity.

But something c.i. said is worth thinking about. There are folk who labor unto exhaustion every day to get the smallest meals or subsistence to live on. (He misunderstood that I meant survival that way but he was right that the poorest seem to be willing to share their last bite with another. I meant survival as the clawing onto a disappearing vestige with every bit of energy left in one's being.)

Is curiosity a luxury available only to the rich? Can the poor waste time on curiosity, exhausted as they are by their labors to survive? But does that fact make curiosity any less worthy for the purpose of this inquiry?

I am back thinking about wit and needing a definition of that trait. Is it inborn and not acquired? Is it a quality or extension of intellect? I think that I do not have this trait, which seems to differ from a sense of humor. My daughter who is age almost-forty is beautiful and what I think of as witty (a bit devastatingly so at times), and I wonder if this quality is off-putting to male creatures who might sniff around her skirts seeking succor but not the challenge of repartee.

I haven't even finished your post, Kara, and am agreeing with you. Wit is an attained luxury, or can be thought of as such. Curiosity goes deeper though, no matter the poverty.
But the downtrodden too have much of it, busy as they are.

I guess I don't think of wit as witty, too bad I am so nebulous about it. Again, I nearly replace it with the word perspective.






Edit to spell 'too' correctly.

Reading Grade: C :wink:

eh!

Don't get me started on northern California--I grew up there for many years in the redwoods on the wet gray foggy coast. Something about that place that makes me skim through readings and not actually finish them. So I do understand, a little.

Drat: I keep mis-reading the title of this thread as: "What is the worthless single trait human beings possess?

Ironically, could we say wit would be a correct answer to that question as well?

No, we couldn't.

eh!

<eh, eh, squeak>

so what are we eh'ing about, again?
Just wait awhile, I always have slow recall.. and am usually if not always lazy.

I forgot too.

Staying strictly on topic might be a good human trait. But those type tend to bore me to tears also. Unless they're my surgeon or something.

agree..

I thought that self-deprecation contests were supposed to be exercises in wit.

Lokk what happens when wit goes.

They would be chucking bombs at each other if they had any.

The activities of the witless had to be shut down.

Power is a fact.When those with it have no wit look out.When they get real serious.

Osso, I agree that wit and witty are not the same thing but both are dependent on a perspective that is not usual or common. But I differ with you about curiosity, which I think is more likely to be found among people who can lift their heads from the grindstone long enough to indulge in it, whereas I have noted wit amongst the poorest.

(Is there a subset here of soggy northern Californians? Those of us who were born there now have a new source of pride: a terrorist cell in Sacramento with connections to Lodi.)

Well I'm glad someone got it. Yes, it was supposed to be an exercise in wit. To see who could hang on the cross, and make fun of themselves just a bit as they hang there. Educating to see that some are just too threatened by all that.

Perhaps another worthy human trait is: Ability to laugh at oneself, and not take oneself too seriously.

You know who you are. Hi Mathos, are you on now? What time is it? Is Britain all one time zone, or does time change beyond Liverpool and Scotland and all that from up north? Can you all still feel the savages from the north peering down at you?

Inquisitiveness or curiosity
whatever you choose to call it.

EM, you have that right. It is okay to take life seriously -- it'll be continuing on for a while and there might be a test. But take ourselves seriously? Not when the gods kill us for sport.