Grammar Girl here, in today's show I'm going to try a slightly different format to see how it works.

First you'll get a quick and dirty tip about backward versus backwards.

Then I'm going to tell you about my trip to England a few weeks ago and all the cool language-related stuff I saw and heard.

And finally at the very end I'm going to finish with a tidbit about why we call it Earl Grey T and whether it's spelled grey with an E or grey with an A.

This week's quick and dirty tip is about backward versus backwards because the question of which word to use just came up internally among our editors.

These words can be adjectives and adverbs so you can say squiggly often forgets to move backward when Ardvarke is casting, that's using backward as an adverb.

And you can say Grammar Girl wishes her Xbox games had backward compatibility, that's using backward as an adjective.

Both backward and backwards are correct but most sources say that when you're using the word as an adverb, backward is standard in American English and back words is standard in British English.

The way I remember the difference is to think that Americans like shortcuts.

For example I'm willing to bet that we eat in our cars more than British people eat in their cars.

So think about how Americans like shortcuts and think about how we locked the S off backwards to make it shorter in the US we use the shorter word, backward.

If you choose to use backwards in the United States it's not wrong but it may look a little weird to people.

It's like spelling color with a U. It draws attention to itself and could be distracting for American readers.

And if you're using British English it's typically backwards as an adverb and back word as an adjective so you have two things to remember.

That was your quick and dirty tip. All that has been raining where I live I'm pretty sure it's still summer.

So if you're looking for a way to keep your kids or yourself entertained try my iOS game Grammar Pop.

It's simple but fun you match words with their part of speech. It's called Grammar Pop and it's in the Apple App Store.

A few weeks ago I had the absolute pleasure of speaking at a small conference in Cambridge in the UK that was entirely about usage guides.

It was called bridging the unbridgeable. I spoke about what it's like to answer language questions on the internet and the changes I've seen over the eight years that I've been grammar girl.

Two of the biggest changes I've seen are the move to shorter articles on the web and even more so the increasing importance of images.

I can't participate on Instagram or Pinterest without an image and I'm finding it's also important to have images when I post on Tumblr and Facebook.

But I worry about things seeming overly simple when I make images.

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