Its omnipresence, its crucial importance for human survival, and its ability so readily to transform form the liquid to the solid to the gaseous states has ensured it prominence in human history. Water plays a prominent role in most creation stories and has a symbolic purifying or regenerating significance in many great religions even to the present day.
Water is distributed very unevenly and with very variable purity over the surface of the earth.
This illustrates the polarity of water. Of course, it is the polarity of water that accounts for its uniqueness. It is ionic enough to be able to separate and insulate some cations from corresponding anions producing a solution where the cations are surrounded by a cage of water molecules. Water haters tend to cluster together to avoid water. It is the entropy increase in water that accounts for this hydrophobic effect.