Did you ever come across a word you’ve written a million times before, and suddenly it just looks wrong? In combing through my manuscript, I found a pair of terms whose proper spelling I can’t seem to get straight: forward and backward. Or is that forwards and backwards? I’ve written them both ways off and on. Determined to escape this linguistic quagmire, I turned to my trusty dictionary. Let’s see… backhand, backhoe, backwash, there it is. Wait, what’s this? Oh great. Thanks a lot, Oxford.

I hoped for final closure, a supreme ruling on that final s. What I got was this: apparently, backward—sans s—is the accepted adjective form. He spurred the chinchilla without a backward glance. When used as an adverb, however, she looked backwards too late to see the tortoise is as acceptable as he shoved the puppy forward and slammed the airlock. In all three cases, the SPCA will be investigating these miscreants.

Writers of British English (I can hear you Brits rolling your eyes at the phrase) have a decidedly simpler time of it. In their version of the language, no s is a good s, whether adverb or adjective. As for we casual Americans, using forward and backward feels mildly stuffy as an adverb; useful when you want to affect a more formal tone. Tossing an s at the end loosens it up with a colloquial flair.

So there you have it, the definite answer: yes. And no.