But the Greek influence on our way of life goes beyond even these, and as the sacred festival of St Valentine's is upon us once again, with all its promise of budding romance, matured affection, and stomach-crushing rejection, we should tip a furry pink hat of acknowledgement towards the Greeks' pioneering attitudes towards love.
Her Marian initially registers as pinched and forbidding, a closed bud with no promise of opening.
Orphan Rescues Grandfather became a box-office hit and a significant cultural event of 1923, not only saving its production company, Star Film Company, from bankruptcy, but also lending hope to the promise of the budding film industry (Xu and Sha 59; S. Zhang 405).
The return of light, the budding of new life, the promise of fresh starts -- these were particularly precious to agrarian people who entrusted themselves, one year at a time, to the cycle of the seasons, but they are precious to us all.
Over lunch, Mother revealed little more, but I had already picked a spring bud of promise from its tree.
"How many thorns of human nature," wrote John Burroughs, "are bristling conceits, buds of promise grown sharp for want of congenial climate". So some people are described as prickly, William Buckley, for instance, and others are called thorny, like Senator Robert Dole.
And a budding generation of brawlers.
It had hints of a budding era of détente.
He has even enjoyed a budding cult of personality.
But, he said, "I saw the budding of a genius.
It grew more pronounced in Ms. Kistler as her technique began to wane in the early 1990s, and it did much to nip the promise of Yvonne Borree in the bud.
