You folks must be either really anal or have nothing better to do. While I agree doing things in a standardized fashion enables us to adhere to safety and eliminates confusion in ATC communications, I don't believe this requires a debate.

Besides, I think that if you fly long enough within our Air Traffic Control System, you will find that not only pilots use non-standard communication (I'd call it short hand communications more often than not) but ATC will use the same. This is true especially in your more congested facilities such as ORD, ATL, CLT (way back when), etc.... My guess why this is done is to shorten communications down to something that might not be standard, but still gets the point across while cutting down on frequency congestion.

Just my thoughts.