past tense of forbid

[Wilson Gray]

Some people have the same problems with simple _bid_:

?bid, bade, bidden?

?bid, bid, bid?

?bid, bidded, bidden?

?bid, bidded, bidded?


On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 9:47 PM, Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at gmail.com> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      past tense of forbid
>
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>
> In an online WPost article today on Justice Sotomayor's dissent from a
> majority opinion of the SCOTUS, Robert Barnes writes, "She reprinted pages
> of graphics showing the decline of minorities at top universities in
> California and Michigan since the states forbid the use of racial
> considerations."  It's possible to construe "forbid" in this sentence as a
> present tense if "since" is causal, but it reads more like a temporal
> "since," which makes a past interpretation more likely.  I've noticed for
> some time some uncertainty among professional writers as to the past tense
> form of "forbid."  This is not the question of how to pronounce "forbade,"
> but rather whether the form is being replaced by the present stem.
>
> Herb
>
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--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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