Here's what I don't get.
You got coffee at a bistro. "The coffee is hot" - nonsense "The coffee was hot" - makes sense
You SAW a woman at the beach. "That woman is beautiful" - sense? "That woman was beautiful" - potential insult?
You got coffee at a bistro. "The coffee is hot" - nonsense "The coffee was hot" - makes sense
You SAW a woman at the beach. "That woman is beautiful" - sense? "That woman was beautiful" - potential insult?
Ordinary people in natural conversation will use the present tense to tell stories set in the past. So, “the coffee is hot” can sometimes mean that the coffee WAS hot.
It’s not something that we ordinarily notice or talk about, it just happens in ordinary conversation. So if we want to understand what “present tense” means, we have to take care to avoid being confused by the name, “present tense”. “Present tense” is just the name of a tense, but there are several different ways that it is used.