ABSTRACT
Wherever you find people, thinking, talking and writing about other people, there you’ll find discourse about personality – about, as the Oxford English Dictionary has it, ‘that quality or assemblage of qualities which makes a person what he is, as distinct from other persons’.2 We call people kindhearted,
generous, fair-minded, witty, flaky, charming, mean-spirited, bitchy, dull, stupid, thoughtless, self-deprecating, bullies, control freaks. Aspects of personality such as these, or what I will call traits (which I pronounce to rhyme with ‘baits’ rather than with ‘bays’), are constantly being appealed to in our everyday descriptions of ourselves and of others.
