Buzz
One common mistake today is replacing biased with bias. While bias is a noun, referring to having or showing prejudice, biased is the correct adjective. Saying ‘your opinion is bias,’ ‘that’s a bias statement,’ or ‘don’t be so bias’ is incorrect.
This error arises from several factors, one of which is the common phenomenon of 't/d deletion' in spoken language, where people often omit the final d or t sounds. For example, ‘I passed through’ may sound like ‘I pass through’ when said quickly and casually.
When a sound is routinely omitted in speech, it tends to appear missing in writing as well. Common mistakes include writing stain glass for stained glass, can goods for canned goods, and bake chicken for baked chicken—frequent errors especially seen on menus.
When an adjective-noun combination is used frequently enough, the –ed may eventually vanish completely. Words like skim milk, popcorn, and iced tea started out as skimmed milk, popped corn, and iced tea. Whip cream is also heading in that direction. Do you use a fine-toothed comb or a fine-tooth comb? Both are acceptable.
The disappearance of biased's ending doesn’t follow this same trend. It doesn’t appear in fixed phrases like skimmed milk (the most common words after biased are prepositions like against and toward). However, bias fits a different pattern: many adjectives describing attitudes towards the world end in –ous, including jealous, righteous, cautious, meticulous, and more. Bias may gain traction because its sound resembles the –ous adjective family.
Bias wouldn’t be the first word to adopt an adjective form by sounding like one. This is similar to what happened with the word genius, which wasn’t used as an adjective until the 1920s, despite having no relation to the –ous suffix. Expressions like “What a genius idea!” became common. Other words, such as prejudice and jaundice, which seem to end like –ous words, are also prone to the same type of error. Searches like “Are you prejudice?” or “He was jaundice” get many results online.
Bias, prejudice, and jaundice are less likely than genius to become fully acceptable as adjectives because their spellings don’t align as well with the expectations for –ous words. They remain errors, but errors that show an interesting sensitivity to the patterns of the English language. In a way, you could say the language is biased toward them.
