Toward or Towards Part V

Uh, maybe this blog isn't turning out to be as entertaining as I had envisioned. I seem to have strayed a long way from funny church signs and trivialities about a favourite food substance, but I promise (myself) I'll finish what I have to say about toward and towards here and move on to something more fun.

The adjectival and adverbial uses of toward/towards:

Toward was used as an adjective meaning "impending," as in There is sure another flood toward, and these couples are comming to the Arke (Shakespeare, As You Like It).

When used of young people, it meant "promising," as in There was never mother had a towarder son (Heywood, Edward IV Part I).

Toward could also mean "favourable," as in He too sends for the Greek ship a toward breeze (Gladstone, Juventus Mundi). Incidentally, about the only survival of this adjectival sense of toward in modern English is in the adjective untoward , meaning "awkward" or "unlucky."

The adverbial uses of toward/towards are not always easy to distinguish from the adjectival, but in the sentence A varlet ronning towards hastily (Spenser, The Faerie Queene), the word clearly functions as an adverb of direction.

One last thing: The adverbial forms of toward are not limited to the zero-derived or endingless toward and the genitive towards. There was also the (now obsolete) form towardly!

Happily, this series of posts is now hastening toward(s) a conclusion.

Toward or Towards Part IV

The OED, which is a historical dictionary (i.e., it lists all the forms and functions that a word has had throughout the history of the language) lists toward and towards as separate headwords. Indeed, there are two entries for toward—the first being the adjective and adverb and the second being the preposition. Towards has only one entry, as preposition and adverb.

In a visually more helpful way:

toward, adjective and adverb
toward, preposition
towards, preposition and adverb

Now, both the adjectival and adverbial uses of toward and towards, respectively, have fallen out of use. (The Concise Oxford still has toward, adj., listed as an archaic form, but I for one am ready to call it obsolete.) Since both toward and towards also functioned as prepositions, what we have is a falling together of two separate words to perform one function, that of a preposition meaning "in the direction of."

So now we have:

toward, adjective and adverb
toward, preposition 
towards, preposition and adverb

And that's why modern English speakers are saddled with two variants. Toward and towards were originally two separate words performing closely related and overlapping functions. Only one of those functions remains in modern English, but both forms have survived. If you like, the -s form is a relic.

(Of course, many linguists would disagree that they were ever two totally separate words, but I don't want to get into the messy business of defining what a word is.)

And in case you are wondering how toward could ever have been an adverb without the -s ending, the OED states that "the advb. use appears to arise out of the predicative use of the adj., or from the neuter adj." That is, the word acquired an adverbial function without changing its form (a process that linguists term zero derivation).

(Another possibility: In Old English, adverbs were also formed with an -e ending, which disappeared in Middle English. This is why it is actually still possible to form adverbs with no adverbial ending per se, as in the phrase dead slow. Some self-appointed grammarians like to huff and puff about people who don't know the difference between adjectives and adverbs, but in fact the "endingless" adverb has a very long history in the English language.)

So, to summarize my posts so far: Which is correct, toward or towards? Both are correct. Is toward American and towards British? No, not really. Does the -s in towards mean anything? Yes.

What were some examples of toward as an adjective and toward/towards as an adverb? That's for my next post (which, I promise, is the last in this dull series).

Toward or Towards Part III

The s-ending of towards is a suffix that forms adverbs, just like -ly. But unlike -ly, the -s suffix is a genitive ending.

What is a genitive? Roughly speaking, a genitive is a noun form that may be translated by the phrase "of the __."

For instance, the genitive form of the Old English noun stan (meaning stone) is stanes, meaning "of the stone." In modern English we no longer speak of the genitive but of the possessive. The possessive case is normally indicated with an apostrophe s (e.g., the cat's toy).

There are, however, many instances where an apostrophe s strictly indicates a genitive relation, not a possessive one. In the phrase a stone's throw, we are speaking not of a throw belonging to the stone but of a throw of the stone (the genitive expresses an object relation for the stone).

Adverbial genitives are -s endings or of a/the phrases that indicate an adverbial function. In a sentence such as Sundays my family goes to church, the -s on Sundays doesn't indicate a plural; it indicates an adverb (of time). That it is a genitive may be shown by the sentence My family goes to church of a Sunday, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing. Phrases such as of an evening or of a Sunday are becoming somewhat quaint in modern English, but they are genitives that express an adverbial function.

In some dialects of English, people say She's ages with him, with the meaning "she and he are the same age." In more standard English, the of form is preferred: She is of an age with him or They are of an age.

If this all seems impossibly archaic, then consider the expression I'm friends with him. The -s here isn't a plural (I'm a friend, he's a friend, we're all friends!), but an adverbial genitive. In this case, however, the of form doesn't seem to be in use.

The adverbial genitive -s is still alive and well. You can see it in usages such as You've got it backwards, Don't look sideways and in the words once, twice, and thrice (where it is spelled with a -ce).

I used to explain all this to some of my long-suffering co-workers at the press. But it never occurred to me (and I believe they were too polite to point out) that, of course, toward/towards isn't an adverb, but a preposition.

So why the adverbial -s? I'll write about that in my next post.

Toward or Towards Part II

Some of the "folk" explanations I read of this variation were quite intriguing. (Most come from here).
 

One was quite refreshing in its consideration of phonological factors, but was unfortunately sort of crazy: "Perhaps, the British use an 's' ... because they pronouce [sic] the word with the accent on the second syllable (toWARDS). S makes an easier transition to the following word; whereas Americans say "TOward" and it flows more easily to the following word so that the 's' is unnecessary."
 

The British do use a linking r (as in the famous "lore-and-order" pronunciation of law and order), but no linking s that I'm aware of.
 

Some felt that toward was used with singular subjects and towards with plural subjects (e.g., He walked toward the water's edge vs. They walked towards the water's edge.) Others advocated the opposite (by analogy with third-person present verbal forms). Somewhat ominously, one person said they had been taught one or other of these theories in school and that their teacher had seemed very convincing.
 

An interesting comment was that towards sounded "backwoodsy." (Perhaps because the -s isn't perceived to be performing a function and therefore seems archaic or obsolete?)
 

This rant I found rather less interesting because it was so ill-tempered, but it does give the lie to the notion that towards is exclusively British:

     I am sensitive about the distinction between 
     toward and towards because of an incident 
     involving the proofs of a book of mine being 
     published by Cambridge University Press in New 
     York. The copy editor, who seemed to be under 
     the impression that he/she had a better ear for the 
     English language than I do, consistently changed 
     my "towards" to "toward." Seemingly, the copy 
     editor took the s-less form to be more American-
     sounding, but since I'm American I feel entitled to 
     make up my own mind (though I have to admit 
     that my mother is English, so maybe I picked up 
     the habit from her.) Anyway, I just strew "STET" 
     all over the manuscript to leave my version alone.

Quite apart from the fact that the past tense of strew is strewed, this author also overlooks the possibility that the copy editor was following house style. All good editors do, even when they disagree with the style on specific points.

It all seems to boil down to the fact that most English speakers have lost a sense for how the -s is functioning in towards, and for that matter also in backwards, sideways, once, and widdershins.

I'll write about that in my next post.

Toward or Towards Part I

The style sheet at the publishing house where I worked for two years specified a preference for toward over towards. I followed the rule conscientiously, of course, but always felt that it was based on a misunderstanding of the -s form.

Now that I've had some time to read and Google around, I realize that 1) this misunderstanding is pervasive and various, and 2) I didn't know as much about this as I had first thought.

First, the misunderstanding: There seems to be widespread agreement that toward is American and towards is British, i.e., that the two forms function as regional markers. This notion is reinforced by Webster's Dictionary of English Usage and by the fact that both the Oxford Canadian Dictionary of Current English and Merriam-Webster list the s-less form first, while the -s form is listed as a variant. The Concise Oxford, on the other hand, does the opposite.

But in comments appended to the various blog posts on this matter, there were Americans who said they always said towards, Britons who said they always said toward, and Americans, Brits, and others who said they said both in free variation. I do not know if the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) will have anything to say on this matter when Vol. 5 (Sl–Z) is published this year.

This theory of regional variation even has embedded in it the notion that Noah Webster introduced the s-less form as a "simplified" form for American English. I thought this was implausible when I first read about it, but after consulting Webster's original dictionary I see he lists only the s-less form, even for the adverb (see 2 above).

Yet it seems clear that there is no transatlantic watershed dividing toward and towards in the same manner as, say, rubber and eraser or pants and trousers. Many people say both; and the ones who claim they always say one or the other often seem to have made up their own reasons for the choice.

I'll say more about "folk" theories of toward vs. towards in my next post.