backward

Usually followed by in and the skill concerned: backward in walking, backward in talking, backward in teething. Child-care manuals of the early twentieth century used it freely. Leonard Keene Hirshberg wrote in 1910 that a child backward in talking showed "no sign of defective intelligence." It describes a lag in timing, which is how it differs from the "slow to learn" meaning.

Astronomers have a learned twin for it, retrograde, and the planets supply the classic case: their occasional apparent backward movement across the sky. What distinguishes it from the "facing away" meaning is the reference point. Here backward is measured against a thing's normal course, such as a wheel's usual spin, not against the way it faces.

This sense measures lateness against a calendar, and it suits seasons, growth and work that ought to be further along by now. It can carry a number (a dry season two months backward) or take in plus the thing that lags (backward in teething). In Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) it simply means behind with a job due the next day. Its nearest neighbors are tardy and overdue.

It lives mostly in the negative. Not backward in coming forward is the playful set phrase for someone who never hesitates to speak up. The word takes in with a gerund (backward in suggesting ideas) or to with a verb, as in Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence (1919), where a cook "was not backward to defend himself."

Shakespeare's The Tempest gives the noun its lasting phrase: "the dark backward and abysm of time." There the past is pictured as a deep, dark space stretching behind the speaker. The noun takes the, like the past itself. It pairs naturally with words of depth and darkness, which is the imagery that line made memorable.

The verb that keeps company with it is cast. John Davies in Nosce Teipsum (1599) has the mind that "can backward cast / Upon herself," and George Eliot in Romola (1862) writes of "casting an unpleasant light backward" on a man's earlier reticence. In both, something is turned back upon its source: thought upon the thinker, or a disclosure upon past conduct.

A chess player's structural term rather than a description of movement. A backward pawn has fallen behind its neighbors on the adjacent files, so it cannot step forward without being exposed. Players treat it as a lasting weakness, especially on a half-open file, where the opponent can pile pressure on it. The word almost always appears in the fixed phrase backward pawn.

Part of cricket's map of fielding positions: backward point and backward square leg name places on the part of the field behind the batsman's popping crease. Used this way, the word is fused into the position's name and comes directly before it. A captain setting the field speaks of these positions as fixed spots, not loose directions.

Here the word compares rather than names, and it takes of. A fielder stands backward of square leg or backward of point, meaning deeper behind the batsman's popping crease than that position. Compare the fielding-position adjective, where the word is built into the name itself, as in backward point. Spotting the of tells you which use you are reading.

A dated transitive verb, and a regular one: backwarded, backwarding, and a third-person form spelled exactly like the familiar adverb backwards. It always needs an object, as in heavy taxes backward growth. In current English, retard, delay or hold back do the same job without sounding old-fashioned.

Alexander Pope's Windsor Forest (1713) shows it at work: "wiser brutes were backward to be slaves." The construction is backward to plus a verb, and the meaning is plain aversion, with no hint of shyness. Because the sense is obsolete, it reads as a period touch today. Its surviving relative is the "reluctant or shy" meaning, usually heard in the negative.

Byron could still write of flying "unconscious o'er each backward year" in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. He uses the word for time already gone, much as bygone is used now. The sense is obsolete, so it belongs to poetry of that age. A modern writer wanting the same effect would reach for past or bygone instead.

The adverb once fixed events at a point in time rather than moving toward it, and that use is now obsolete. It differs from the "into the past" meaning, as in looking backward through history. That meaning implies motion, while this one marks a fixed position. Modern writers say formerly or in the past instead. Backward used this way will read as archaic or as a slip.