"no foothold" can be used in written English.
It is an idiom that means to have no control or influence over a situation. For example: "The new mayor struggled to gain any foothold in City Hall as she faced opposition from the long-standing city council members."
Non-believers — and many believers themselves — assume that, without a grounding in religious knowledge, there is no foothold for fruitful religious understanding.
But he could find no foothold within an introverted Gaelic state, and the austere minimalism of his art is, among other things, a critique of bloated nationalist rhetoric.
Well distilled and versatile, the selection consists of quiet tweaks on work wear and prep staples, largely from European and Japanese brands with little or no foothold in New York.
He listened hard and heard him say, "Save me, O God, for the waters threaten my life; I am sunk in the abysmal swamp where there is no foothold".
Fox News, displaying its mastery of making colour-based accusations about the kettle from its pot-based position, reported that Stewart was "not a force for good" and that his sustained criticisms of the right "had no foothold in the facts".
No footholds or handholds.
In this way, diplomats say, officials protect their own trafficking networks, allowing no footholds for smaller players.Foreign donors have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on border security and counter-narcotics projects designed to cut trafficking and boost Tajikistan's legal economy.
Although the mafia has no obvious foothold in the art world, and would have had no apparent motive for burning down La Fenice, it had been responsible in the past for the bombing of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Church of St John Lateran in Rome and Milan's Gallery of Modern Art, as well as scores of art robberies and various other attempts to damage cultural institutions.
Let us ensure that conflict finds no further foothold than it already has.
Despite President Bush's repeated claims, Al Qaeda had no significant foothold in Iraq before the invasion, which gave it new base camps, new recruits and new prestige.
