Discussion Groups / English Usage / May 2009

Only a tiny bit.  Figurative uses more often use "towards," while
"toward" more often indicates a physical direction.  If in doubt, you
can just about always choose "towards" without confusing anybody.

¬R   "The Home Shopping Network is the New Jersey of Drugs"
http://users.bestweb.net/~notr/engel.html      --marika5000

They're both used differently for their different uses.

No, not much.  Maybe a little difference in some people's usage is
all.

Oddly, I once made a post on this subject, which is available at
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/aue/besides.html

It's short, so I reproduce it below.

           ------ cut here ------

Interesting question.  Let's see: "toward(s)" -- How do I mean thee?
Let me count the ways:

(a) He walked steadily toward(s) the man with the gun.
     [goal-directed continuous linear motion, object = goal]
(b) Toward(s) midnight, things get a little rowdy downtown.
     [TIME is SPACE metaphor mapping of (a), object = terminal
instant]
(c) Toward(s) the end of the book it gets technical.
     [READING is TRAVELING metaphor mapping of (a)]

(a)-(c) sound perfectly ordinary either way (though one additional
unresolved question beside the "s" /z/) is the W. Is it pronounced
or not?  I use all of these myself:
   /tord/      /tword/
   /tordz/     /twordz/)

(d) She's acting rather oddly toward(s) me.

Aha! I do find the "s" here a little strange, perhaps because it
brings
too strong a physical sense of the motion, which is purely abstract
in this case.  The sentence is about the two people involved, not
the metaphorical transfer of behavioral information via the Conduit
Metaphor; any focus on that is wasted effort - it'll be presupposed.

But that's the only difference I can think of offhand, and it's not
very big, and it might easily be personal whim.  I'd guess the
variation
isn't semantic at all, but sociolinguistic.  Oh, and I assume you have
dictionaries available.

"Beside(s)" is another matter.  The principal spatial sense is obvious
(be [at] side [of]); but it's deictic, and those are always difficult
to
define (check out any dictionary on "left" vs. "right", for instance).
A lot depends on what the object is, and whether it can be said to
have
a distinguished direction called a "side", or whether it simply means
'close to' without any radial or directional information.  But the
strictly physical basic meaning can't use "s":

  (e) The Barcalounger will look great beside(*s) the sofa.

Besides that meaning, though, there's a very different one that means
"in addition".  You can sort of see the dead metaphor in that, but
it's so far from its source that I'd call it a different word.  One
argument for that analysis is that you *can* use "s" with it:

  (f) The Barcalounger will look great; beside(s), we've already
paid.

If we look hard enough, we might find something along these lines for
"toward(s)", too.

-John Lawler        U of Michigan Linguistics Dept
 http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/disclaimers.html
 #include disclaimers.h