I do not know why certain things refuse to stick. No matter how well you prepare, how much you read, how many times it is explained.

Let me show you exactly what I mean.

You start learning a topic. You read about it. You get through the first three ideas comfortably. Then you arrive at the fourth one and hit a wall.

You read it again. Nothing. You find a second source that explains it differently. Nothing. You ask ChatGPT. You ask it to simplify. You ask it to explain it as though you were nine. Nothing. You go on a YouTube rampage — three tutorials, a lecture, an Indian man with a whiteboard who is genuinely excellent at his job.

Nothing.

It is as if the information reaches the door of your head, looks inside, and decides not to come in.

So you get the sentence we all memorised from school. No need to understand it. Just memorise it.

That has never worked for me. I go to the etymology. I need the root. I need to know where a word came from and what it was doing before it got here, otherwise it does not settle.

Then comes the better teacher’s advice. Skip it and come back later.

Also not me.

I cannot move forward without standing on every step. I do not skip in a queue and I do not skip in a book. I read the preface. I read the introduction. I read the acknowledgements, which nobody reads, and which are usually about someone’s wife.

Which is why I could never handle Give Yourself Goosebumps.

For anyone who missed the nineties: Goosebumps were R.L. Stine’s horror books for children, and there were dozens of them. Then came the spin-off, where you were the main character and every few pages you had to make a choice. Open the door, turn to page 47. Run, turn to page 82. Around twenty different endings, most of them bad, and the only way to read the whole book was to jump around it like a lunatic.

I could not do it. I read them in page order, start to finish, which produces total nonsense and defeats the entire concept.

I was not a fun child.

Anyway. I am stuck.

And the feeling is so familiar by now that I have given it a name and a face.

His name is Icky and he is sticky. Black, with braids, and he eats those tiny fake baby carrots. Bag after bag. I do not know why. He will not explain it and I have stopped asking.

Anything he touches becomes stuck. Not difficult. Not confusing. Stuck. A thing I cannot get over, around, or through.

And this month he decided to touch aspect.

Aspect is the second half of the verb.

Every verb carries two pieces of information about time, and most people only know about the first one.

Tense is the one everybody knows. It answers when. Past, present, future. Yesterday, now, tomorrow. From Latin tempus, meaning time.

Aspect answers something else entirely. Not when the action happened, but how it sits in time. Is it finished or unfinished? A single point or a long stretch? A habit or a one-off? Are you looking at it from outside, as a closed package, or from inside, while it is still running?

And here is the part I love, because it is the part that finally made me half-understand it. The etymology.

Aspect comes from Latin aspectus — a look, a view, an appearance. From ad-, meaning towards, and specere, meaning to look. The same root that gives us spectacle, inspect, spectator.

So aspect is literally the angle you are looking from.

Tense tells you where the event is. Aspect tells you where you are standing while you look at it.

In English, you use it constantly without noticing.

I ate. Finished. One block. Seen from outside.
I was eating. Unfinished. In progress. You are inside it, watching it happen.
I have eaten. Finished, but still relevant now. It has consequences.
I used to eat. A habit that stopped.

All four can point to the same afternoon. Same time. Four different camera positions.

In French, aspect is unavoidable, because the past tense forces you to choose between two of them.

Il pleuvait — it was raining. Ongoing. No edges. You are inside it while it happens.
Il a plu — it rained. Finished. A single closed event with a beginning and an end.

Both are past. Same time. The difference is entirely aspect.

Which is why French learners suffer. English lets you say “it rained” and stay vague about whether it was a downpour or an afternoon. French makes you commit. Every time you talk about the past, you declare which angle you are looking from.

The textbook sentence is quand je suis arrivé, il pleuvait. When I arrived, it was raining. Arriving is a point. Raining is a stretch. The point lands inside the stretch, and you cannot build that sentence without knowing which is which.

In Arabic, aspect is not one feature among several. It is the foundation.

There are two basic verb forms. الماضي, which classical grammarians called تام — complete. And المضارع, which they called ناقص — incomplete.

Look at what those words are describing. Not past and present. Complete and incomplete. The grammarians were not classifying time. They were classifying whether the action is finished.

Arabic absolutely expresses time. Every language does. It just does not put time inside the verb form. Time gets added from outside. قد before a completed verb pulls it close to now. سوف or the prefix س pushes an incomplete verb forward into the future. كان placed before an incomplete verb — كان يكتب — takes an unfinished action and sets it in the past. He was writing.

Which means the same verb form can land in the past, the present, or the future depending on what stands beside it. Because the form was never marking time in the first place. It was marking completion.

So an English speaker walks in assuming when did it happen is the fundamental question, and discovers that in Arabic it is the secondary one, handled by a neighbouring word. Meanwhile the question they barely think about — is this finished or not — is carrying the entire structure.

Three languages. Three different opinions about what a verb is for.

	English	French	Arabic
What the verb form marks first	Tense	Tense	Aspect
Completed action	I ate	Il a plu	كتب
Ongoing action	I was eating	Il pleuvait	يكتب
Ongoing, set in the past	I was eating	Il pleuvait	كان يكتب
Future	I will eat	Il pleuvra	سيكتب
Finished but still relevant	I have eaten	J’ai mangé	قد كتب
How aspect is expressed	Auxiliaries and -ing	Separate tense forms	Built into the verb form itself
How time is expressed	Built into the verb form	Built into the verb form	Added by particles and context
Can you avoid choosing an aspect?	Often yes	In the past tense, no	Never

And I still do not have it.

I could write all of that. I just did. I could source it, footnote it, and hand it to a student.

But I do not have it. Not the way I have things I actually understand. It is a shape I can trace without being able to build.

Icky touched it.

So what I need is somebody who can get him off.

Her name is Kleany, with a K. She is the opposite of Icky in every way. Where he leaves things stuck, she leaves them in order. She wipes surfaces. She squares up the edges of paper. She puts things back where they belong and she is very calm about it.

She does not fight Icky. She just arrives, cleans the area, and whatever he was holding onto is simply no longer stuck.

The problem is she does not take appointments.

You cannot call her. You cannot book her. She never comes when you sit at the desk with the book open and the coffee ready and the whole afternoon cleared. That is the one time she is guaranteed not to appear.

She turns up in the shower. Or four days later on a Thursday while somebody is telling a long story about a car. Or at eleven at night when you have stopped caring, and suddenly the thing is just there, in three dimensions, obvious.

So I am doing something I have never done in my life.

I am taking the good teacher’s advice. Skipping it. Coming back later.

Later meaning: whenever Kleany decides.

And Icky can keep the carrots.