This character trait was on brilliant display from Tuesday until this morning.
As the Venus's flytrap of players, he has excelled at psychology, just one trait of a brilliant basketball mind.
She has no idea how frequently I dismissed her husband's serial adultery as an unfortunate trait of an otherwise brilliant man.
Other examples of sexually selected traits include the peacock's brilliant tail-feathers.
Mr. Hammond, who has mastered a Bill Clinton impersonation that presents him as a gleeful womanizer, has the drawling Gore intonation down but hasn't yet found the single personality trait that makes for a brilliant satiric portrait.
Then he picks up the tale with the man who brought them together, that brilliant yet shadowy impresario Sergei Diaghilev, "a muddle of odious personal traits and eccentricities".
Then, based on the very same traits and facts, the defense attorney presents an equally brilliant, but completely opposite, psychological profile that proves beyond any shadow of doubt that Dmitri could not possibly have committed the crime.
It was by no means his defining trait — relatives and colleagues described a man who played a brilliant piano, loved hiking mountains and might settle a friendly argument at dinner by pulling an etymological dictionary off the shelf.
Rarer still is the noteworthiest trait of the monkey, called the lesula: a patch of brilliant blue skin on the male's buttocks and scrotal area that stands out from the surrounding fur like neon underpants.
"This is the first time anyone's used a single gene to implant something as complex as a behavioral trait into another species," says Young. "It's a brilliant piece of work," says Dean Hamer, a behavioral geneticist at the National Cancer Institute.
