The unlovely world of real estate meets the forbidden fruit of grammar

Wednesday, 19 November 2025

House auctions and real estate prose become even more forbidding when contemplating whether you’ve just bid, bidded or bade.

Joe Bennett is an award-winning Lyttelton-based writer, columnist and playwright. He is a regular contributor.

OPINION: The trouble with the phrase “Houston, we have a problem” is that nobody said it. What Jack Swigert the astronaut actually said was, “OK Houston, we’ve had a problem here”.

There’s also trouble with the pronunciation. Swigert pronounced Houston Hooston, whereas my upbringing screams for it to be Heuston. But I am not from those parts, so I suppose I must bow to local oosage.

Still, “Houston, we have a problem” remains a handy way to introduce a problem. And my problem today is of English grammar. Specifically it concerns the past tense and the past participle of the verb to bid. (That noise you just heard was thousands dashing for the exits, their hands over their ears, their mouths all silent-screaming à la Munch. So now it’s just you and me on this warm spring day. Let’s plunge together into the cool pool of grammatical enquiry.)

As I mentioned last week, I have re-entered the unlovely world of real estate. (I am grateful, by the way, for the emails of condolence that you didn’t send. You realised, bless you, that I must face this trial alone, and that any expressions of sympathy, however kindly meant, might cause my little lip to pucker, my spine to buckle and my resolve to dissolve.)

So, after wading through horror swamps of real-estate adjectives - eyes averted, a bunch of lavender clamped to the nostrils - I found a house that would do, all swish and be-bathroomed in the modern style. I emptied the piggy bank on the kitchen bench, took a deep breath and drove to real estate central. Oh, what a palace it was, all gleam and plush. What I took to be a water feature was money, dripping.

OK Houston, we’ve had a problem here - the phrase which hasn’t quite made its way through history, from the days of Nasa’s harrowing efforts to return Apollo 13 to Earth.

I lodged an offer just ahead of the deadline, then rang a friend to boast. She asked me how much I had bid.

“I dot dot dot,” I said. For I found I was not sure of the past tense of the verb to bid. Bid? Bade? Bidded?

Regular English verbs form both their past tense and their past participle by adding -ed or its equivalent. Irregular verbs don’t. Consider lie and lay.

To lie, meaning to tell fibs, is regular. Trump lies. Trump lied yesterday. Trump has lied all his life.

To lay, meaning to place or put out, is also regular. Hens lay eggs. The hens laid eggs yesterday. The hens have laid eggs all summer.

But to lie, meaning to be horizontal, is irregular. Trump lies in the offal-pit of dishonesty. Trump lay in the offal-pit of dishonesty yesterday. Trump has lain in the offal-pit of dishonesty all his life.

So it’s lie, lied, lied and lay, laid, laid, but lie, lay, lain. All good fun, as I’m sure you’ll agree, and offering great scope for catching people out and feeling superior, which is the point of grammatical knowledge. But it doesn’t help with bid.

If bid were regular the past tense would be bidded, but that sounds like toddler-speak to me.

The OED insists that the past tense and the past participle are both the same as the present tense, i.e. bid. I never argue with the OED unless it’s wrong. And surely it’s wrong here. For one thing, bid doesn’t sound right as a past tense, and for another, consider forbid, which is the same verb plus a prefix.

The past tense of forbid is forbade (pronounced bad) and the past participle forbidden. Should it not be the same with little bid? I reckon it should.

So how much did I bid? I bade more than I could afford. And how did it go? I was comprehensively outbidden. So, Houston, I still have a problem. Back to the swamp.