Word: foothold
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...exhausting scramble. Dry snow, fine as sand, and rock, crumbled by the unending freeze-and-thaw, gave no firm foothold. But at 11:55 a.m., sucking at the thin, cold air, they were at the center of the long, narrow summit, where they planted a Peruvian flag...
...down inside it. No coons came out. Finally-although the opening at the top was only 18 inches across-the boy squeezed himself down inside the tree, bracing his feet against a rotten projection. He hoped to look for coons in a hollow limb part way down. But his foothold broke. Roger slid down 20 feet, stuck momentarily and began sliding again. Skinned, startled and breathless, he landed at the bottom...
...government's foothold in this area of private decision is very small of course--an hour a week--and it may be difficult to see in it any serious threat to privacy. But the principle of private choice has been breached, and its use as a defense against further attacks has been diminished seriously. Once you have admitted the government's right to influence your decisions on behalf of organized religion, you have little excuse for not admitting its right to pressure you on other matters, now as private as religion once was. Once schools can legally sprout steeples, then...
...issue which now stalemates the truce talks is Russian representation on a truce commission. The U.N. attitude is that Russia is not a "neutral," and to recognize her as such would be to give her a legal foothold in South Korea; the U.N. had gone quite far enough by its willingness to accept as neutrals the Soviet stooges, Czechoslovakia and Poland. But the Communist negotiators stick stubbornly to the demand, even though the U.N. has said (in its bluntest words yet) that its position is "firm, final and irrevocable." Even if this issue can be settled, there remains the question...
...when he was not sure he wanted to be an artist. After a few months of formal training in Paris, he decided that he had "nothing to learn in schools." He became a clerk, then a wine merchant, and for a while he was happy. "I was gaining a foothold. To complicate things, I needed a wife, furniture, a maid, a brother-in-law, a car, kids . . . [Then] catastrophe, it took hold of me again. I rented a little atelier on Boulevard Saint-Michel, I locked myself in. My wife didn't like it, that's understandable...