Over the last few years I’ve seen an annoying trend of people not understanding that the past tense of “bias” is “biased.” The data doesn’t show anything, but here’s 3 random examples from no-name twitter accounts.
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At first I thought this was just a common typo, but now I think people just think it’s a word with special grammar rules. I see this all over my FB feed and forum posts.
Fortunately I’ve never seen this construction. Although I have seen “bias crime” which sounds awkward enough as it is: even if it is grammatical it sounds like something someone sloppy would say like “democrat politician”.
That reminds me of a phrase that annoys me: “worse case [situation]” instead of “worst case”. I guess it’s easy to drop that final sound in “worst” and “biased”.
This is actually fairly common – and yes, very annoying – and I suspect just comes from mishearing being transposed into misspelling, since the “-ed” suffix is easy to miss.
Small nitpick: the “biased” in your examples is not technically past tense, but could be regarded as either a past participle with “were” being the auxiliary verb supporting it, or as an adjective so that “they were biased” follows in the pattern of “they were angry”. I’m not sure there’s actually a distinction since past participles can be used as verbal adjectives.
Try explaining a participle to the world one person at a time.
I’ve never seen the past tense of bias misused. (“He biased the court against them.”) All of your examples are people not understanding that the participle form of “bias” is “biased.”
(See also “cliche.”)
I see a lot of people dropping the “ed” from “renowned” these days, as in “a renown performer.”
And not just ordinary people on the Interwebs, although that’s where I first saw it.
That’s really the point: Functionally there’s really no difference.
This has nothing to do with tense. You still would say, “They’re biased,” which is present tense. Only verbs have tense in English, and the root bias is mostly used as a participle/adjective (about 10 times more than as verbs in speech). When it is used as a verb, 70% of the time it’s in an academic (written) context.
It’s not uncommon for English language learners to drop the morpheme -ed in situations like this, simply because it carries such relatively low stress that it lacks prominence. It could be that something similar is happening in these OPs examples.
Tried.
Failed.