@のｂるしｔｙぱんｋｙ You can say whatever you please. I was answering the question: "I was told"? Are you not a native speaker? You make a lot of very authoritative assertions about French for someone who does not speak it natively. from Aerovistaie. And you are manipulating what I said which was an honest answer. Some answers are more informed than others. It's not about taking "precedence".

You are misusing that term in English. I am not here to learn, really. I am here to share what I know. Peer review only works if people really are peers. And not everyone is a peer , that's for sure. You do not engage is fair play. La morale, vous pouvez vous la gardez. Merci.

La morale de bas niveau, je dois ajouter. To be so mean about what I said IN RESPONSE TO Aerovistae's question is PROOF you are NOT nice.

@Lambie No, I told you that “c'est le monde à l'envers” is the idiomatic way to say it. “C'est le monde à l'envers” is what I wrote, not what you wrote. (Cc @Aerovistae)

@Lambie Yes.

People are allowed to have different screen names on different SE sites. In chat, the name has to come from one site. You can choose which one, but you can't have a different chat name in different chat rooms (except the rooms associated with Stack Overflow and Meta Stack Exchange, because these two run on separate servers).

@のｂるしｔｙぱんｋｙ This is not really true. Reputation is about content contributed here, but “reputation” does not really indicate trustworthiness.

“I'm a native speaker” is a credential, and so is “I've spent X years in the country”.

Authoritativeness is not a good way to justify answers. If something is disputed, we should look for references (e.g. dictionary, peer-reviewed linguistics paper).

But native speaker's intuition is sometimes hard to find references for. With that, at some point, you have to agree to disagree — we don't all have the same idiolect.

@Gilles No, you said, and I paraphrase: "I understood every sentence" [which is kind of an odd thing to say] you wrote but there were some "tournures non-idiomatiques (C'est le monde à l'envers)". That implies that that was a tournure non-idiomatique. ///Some aspects of language usage cannot be looked up.

However, a linguist can present an argument about it. //About the chat room name: It is very confusing if in the main forum one name is used and then another name is used here. I was just stating that for me.

@Gilles, here is the exact quote, fyi: "Par contre, en parlant du loup, je comprends chaque phrase malgré quelques fautes d'orthographe (attention aux accords) et quelques tournures non idiomatiques (« c'est le monde à l'envers »)."

The implication is that the term is not idiomatic. So, it was what I wrote to Aerovistae was correct.

@Gilles D'accord, « “reputation” does not really indicate trustworthiness. ». Et merci d'avoir remis les pendules à l'heure avec cette explication à laquelle je me rallie entièrement. « Authoritativeness is not a good way to justify answers », clairement. On ne peut nier que l'expertise et le degré de connaissance des utilisateurs varient.

Ce qui était surtout important pour moi c'est qu'il n'y ait pas de classes d'utilisateurs, que tous soient égaux. Qu'une expertise alléguée ne serve pas de prétexte à une glose systématique des contenus ; ou qu'elle ne soit pas utilisée pour tenter d'imposer à l'extérieur de la mécanique du vote quelle devrait être la bonne réponse, ou qu'elle ne soit pas érigée en fin de non recevoir en ce qui a trait à la modification du contenu d'une réponse.

J'aimerais que les réponses soient davantage motivées et qu'elles incluent des citations dignes de ce nom quand c'est possible, évitant ainsi souvent bien des tergiversations en commentaires. Et oui tout à fait, « we don't all have the same idiolect », et donc à un moment donné il faut accepter que la langue soit multiple et qu'on ne puisse tout savoir.

L'histoire du « monde à l'envers », j'ai retrouvé l'expression avec « monde renversé » sur Larousse en ligne. Faut croire que l'usage varie.

D'après moi ce qui gène est qu'en réalité we all draw from our personal store of knowledge here when we're not inclined or endowed with the time to do a thorough job backing up our opinions. But when that happens, the courteous thing to do is to concede that if challenged, one will have to substantiate it on more than say-so — even say-so that is backed up by decades of experience. It's reasonable to realize that native speaker vs. professional translator is an unwinnable contest in principle...

...insofar as neither first-languagehood nor training superdominates the other. And opinions are not necessarily even commensurable if there are also different philosophies involved about what makes good usage. One person's career consists of ruling out expressions in order to find the single ideal rendering that can make it into a final text, another's life consists of hearing and using a variety of tournures. Even if the stores of knowledge and training are equivalent...

...the accustomed uses they're put to are different.

In practice I find people seem to award votes and reputation based mainly on (1) recognizing something they already know and not finding something they think is false, (2) noting existing reputation, eloquence, humour, style, formatting, adherence to SE policy, and other things irrelevant to the correctness of the answer, and only at the end of the line (3) encountering compelling, well-cited evidence that they have something new to learn...

As such, answers and comments that seem to rule out or disprivilege expressions that people might use daily, whether they conform to some standard version of French or not, are going to be much less popular than ones that merely suggest ways to say something that everybody has said at some point; and those that don't use markdown formatting consistently are going to suffer "presentation" marks

Here's an example of an answer that doesn't deserve to be my highest-voted on any SE site... numerous comments corrected my facts, the references are thin, etc. One wonders how much the picture helped.

But all that said, at the end of the day, a well-crafted answer that cites good sources, however it's formatted or written, will at least not get downvotes even if it doesn't get the upvotes it deserves. Downvotes come from perceived incorrectness and perceived attitude, which include, for better or for worse, resting on credentials to convince someone of an answer they weren't convinced by on its own merits

For my money, though, the background of the answerer does add something. Since I'm not a native speaker either, my own background is all I have to compare it with or justify my own answers when I'm not thorough about citing... Lambie and I have the same colour ticket into the discussion, so to speak, which may be why I find the background compelling, and am sometimes surprised by how stridently those assertions about language are rejected or dismissed

That ended up being much more rambling than I hoped