THE usually estimable Nicholas Kristof takes a strange step here:

Many years ago, when I studied Arabic intensively at the American University in Cairo, I was bewildered initially because for the first couple of months I learned only the past tense. That's the basic tense in Arabic, and so in any Arabic conversation I was locked into the past. The Obama administration seems equally caught in the past, in ways that undermine the secular pro-Western forces that are Egypt's best hope. I hope the White House learns the future tense.

Mr Kristof seems to have had a rather bad Arabic teacher. It's true that that the shortest form of an Arabic verb is the third-person male past tense. The three-letter root k-t-b, with its general meaning of "writing", has the simplest verb form kataba, "he wrote." So verbs are typically listed in this form in the dictionary. Since short vowels in Arabic aren't written, this means that the dictionary entry would just be ktb.

As it happens I was reading about the Arabic grammatical tradition yesterday. Traditional Arabic analysis is unsurprisingly different from traditional western grammar (typically based on Greek and Latin), and even more different from modern syntax, post-Chomsky. It wouldn't surprise me if Mr Kristof's teacher hadn't learned that since kataba ("he wrote") is the shortest form, it was the atomic or ur-form, and that the past was therefore "the basic tense", an analysis that wouldn't make it through a graduate seminar in western linguistics. The fact that Mr Kristof's teacher dwelt on the past "for the first couple months" is worse.

But I'd chalk this up to a holdover of traditional, slightly misguided Arabic grammatical analysis. (And the analysis of English in centuries past has gifted us, too, a few mistaken beliefs we've yet to shake off, a post for another day.) I wouldn't take even the humorously rhetorical step of saying "the Obama administration seems equally caught in the past" based on this little anecdote of Mr Kristof's dud Arabic teacher. As it happens, we agree with Mr Kristof on Egypt. But sometimes grammar is just grammar and a mistake is just a mistake.

(Thanks to Mark Liberman.)