Welcome to Gaia! ::

I've been thinking about this for some time. I'm not sure if I should leave or not.
The reason I think I should leave is, well, I use slang. Always have, always will (even Internet slang). There's a certain extent to which I do use it, and that's when I'm trying to be humorous and light-hearted. I even speak a bit of it in my speech. School is where I throw that away while I'm writing, because it's not the place for it. That's not to say that when people mix up "r" for "are", a little robot in my head explodes (if I wanted to, I could've spelled that "es'plodes"...but that might've not been very nice. ^^; ).
I have friends who will drive people insane here with their lack of spelling and grammar. Most of them are very good friends I've met since I've been on Gaia. I don't know them in the contexts of the real world, but they're friendly enough on Gaia, and I enjoy their company.
When it comes to role-playing, I'm very serious in literacy. I try to make every post a small paragraph or a couple of words like a story. If I'm going to do that, then I'd appreciate if the others who I'm role-playing with could show that same effort. I don't punish for writer's block, because for those who do role-play, we get it.
When it comes to the Gaia Towns, I get approached because of my avatar. I like it, and some other people "like" it, too. When a "no0b" starts begging for gold or to borrow my items with no sense of grammar, then I get pissed. But if someone just comes up to me with just a simple "hi how r u", I get annoyed. My "red-pen-dar" goes off, but I just return the greeting in my own way. They haven't done anything bad to me at that point in time, so why be rude to them?
I had an interesting talk on a fellow with IMVU. His name is DeseD, but I just sometimes call him Big D. At first, I didn't like him because of the way he spoke, y'know, the "hi how r u"-thing. I got irritated, told him to speak "properly" and, well, he surprised me. We later went on to discuss the reason why by forcing others to "talk properly", you shut a lot of people out of prospective friends (that's not to say we don't have predophiles who use either "language".). Before, if anyone talked to me like that over the Internet, I'd assume they were a kid (but there are a lot of kids who use that speech over the Internet), and I'd want nothing to do with them. But some of us here might be kids who use English pretty well, and would seem older. I gave it some thought, and, well, I gave people a chance. I did meet a lot of butt-heads, but I've met some nice people, too. Don't really care about age anymore, because anyone can make that up.
I mod some words, make up my own, or even slip into different tongues. I think that might get me in trouble here, too. Then again, I've seen a couple of people who've been let in here, and they mess up every rule imaginable.
What do you guys think?

You should definitely stay! Obviously you know how to use the language properly, and using little abbreviations and altered words isn't a big problem (in my mind) if you know when to use them; friendliness is NOT a sin! biggrin heart heart

Believe it or not, slang is actually part of the English language (seriously, check your MW Dictionary). It's acceptable since it's ten times more understandable than text talk.

Agreed with burning_light, as well.

Sounds to me like your doubt about belonging here comes from the fact you're not a snob.

You acknowledge you prefer proper English. But you're not going to come here and post a "Can you believe what an idiot this guy is!" thread if someone who doesn't approaches you. You're not going to suggest lighting him on fire, or that he's somehow below you.

Some people in this community will.

But not everyone. *shrug* So if you're looking for a place where the maturity level is consistently higher... Maybe this isn't the place for you. Maybe you've moved beyond Gaia, even, considering the average age. It's up to you to figure out if you're interacting with the kind of people you want to here.

I completey get where you are coming from on this. I even debated with myself if I should even join this guild at first. Because I'm friend to slang and throwing in my own words when I talk. I even do it when I am typing. I normally call people dude or dudette (one girl got a offended being called dude, so now I use dudette for chicks.) And I say bruh a lot too, but I normally don't type that one out. But I say it almost all the times and even to teachers. Luckily this semester I have some gravy teachers who don't take offense to it and know me.

But I mean you aren't a snob about grammar just bad grammar annoys you, same with me, but you aren't rude about it. But that doesn't mean you don't belong to this guild, because you do care. (Someone said that earlier but I felt like I should say it again.) I care to and it's nice to come to a place where I know good grammar is going to be used. Even if I'm not like all the other people in this guild, which is good because that would get pretty boring and lame if we were all the same. (No offense to anyone. I wouldn't enjoy it too much if I met a person like me, so there you have.)
You are just tolerable(sp?) of others and there is no harm in that at all.

Well, I think you should stay!
I mean I know that everybody uses it at least like once a while so yeah..

Agreed! mrgreen