Word: focal
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Instead, Houses tend to acquire a social focal point, causing students on the periphery to feel alienated in their own Houses which was originally designed to provide a familial center of identification. Opponents to the random or modified random system say group identification in Houses would be destroyed by such a change. Yet they fail to realize that while people can always find some friends in the 350-or-more-person Houses,' smaller groups of people often feel shoved to the outer parameters of the social milieu dominated by a strong central group on which the reputation is founded...
...next carver up, Jim Sprankle, offered no-nonsense instructions, going down deep into all the arcana of his craft. His listeners failed to notice the humor in his remark on concentrating on the head area of your duck. "As far as I'm concerned, that's the focal point. That's what draws you in. You don't look at someone's tail first, so to speak...
...British empire fades, the chief empire builder becomes Uncle Joe, and the focal point of controversy becomes Poland. Churchill has backed one Polish exile "government" and Stalin another. Now, with the Red Army sweeping across Eastern Europe, Stalin demands and then seizes total power for his puppets. Churchill's protests go for nothing. Roosevelt, weary unto death ever since the Yalta conference early in 1945, remains all too characteristically hopeful. "I would minimize the general Soviet problem as much as possible," he says in one of his last messages to Churchill, on April 11, 1945, "because these problems...
McDougall agrees that crew means a great deal more to him than just rowing. He describes it as "a focal point," a "source of solidarity...
Maggie, of course, is a focal point for one of Williams' perfervid, evocative (if dramatically a bit clumsy) explorations of Southern familial passions. Her husband Brick has taken to the bottle and thrown her out of bed in despondency over the death of his best friend and the specter of his own homosexuality. Their marital crisis reaches a boil at the birthday party...