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I think "was" is used for events , prettiness isn't an event , I expect : he told me that I'm pretty , why do we need the past tense with beauty ?

another question :

is there a book that talks about prepositions ? sometimes I dont know what to use after certain verbs , like : she gossips about me , at me , to me , crush into /in , it is bad to me / for me .. etc I wish I could find it .

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    If you’re trying to learn English as a foreign language, you’ll get better and easier to understand answers on our sister site, [ELL.se]. There are some amazing teachers there. – Dan Bron Oct 23 '18 at 16:39
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    Prepositions are hard. There isn’t any logical rule saying when to use in and when to use on. Someone whose native language was Spanish, which uses en for both, told me how he’d been taught that getting in a car meant inside and on a car meant on top. Then, he went to the airport, and was told to get on the airplane. We also sit in a chair but on a sofa. I grew up in the western US and stand in line, but my older relatives from New York stood on line (until online came to exclusively mean connected to the Internet). You just have to memorize them. – Davislor Oct 23 '18 at 17:54
  • "I think that was is used for events". Well, here you have supplied proof that it is not. What you thought was wrong. It is not used for events. As to prepositions, you can't learn them from a book. It just doesn't work that way. But if you have a couple months to kill, you can always check out the The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. That is the best book. – RegDwigнt Oct 23 '18 at 18:21
  • Two other comments on prepositions from a book. One: modern descriptive linguists describe how people talk and write in the real world, rather than make up rules for how they should. So, for prepositions, you'd do well to read some good, recent books that you enjoy and pay close attention to how the author uses them. (Especially any differences between the third-person narrator speaking more formally and characters' dialogue, and how the author tries to make characters sound smart or dumb, nice or rude.) – Davislor Oct 24 '18 at 04:37
  • Two: it's a good idea to ask your second question separately on this site. – Davislor Oct 24 '18 at 04:38

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Either “He told me I was pretty,” or “He told me I’m pretty,” would be correct here. A good strategy is to type the usage you’re wondering about into a search engine, in this case "told me I'm" and "told me I was", to see when and how native speakers use them in writing.

In formal English, the rule is that the verb tenses in a sentence should agree with each other. Since someone observing me in the past could only comment on my appearance then, not now, the more logical choice is “I was pretty.” The present tense is appropriate for timeless statements (“Euclid proved that the square of a hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the legs.”) In the most formal written English, older books will tell you to use the subjunctive for counterfactual clauses (“he thought I were”) but that’s gone extinct.

Davislor
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