Pith: (noun) The central and most important part of something such as an argument or discussion.
When I was in school I was pleasantly surprised to be given the task of gathering frogs for dissection in class. I managed to trap enough specimens to make my teacher happy and torture many of the lovely young ladies I wanted to impress. (It was a miserable failure as you might guess.) From the capture we moved on to the nastier element of learning how to euthanize the specimen humanely.
