Jim, it is precisely because of your own Beatles example that I referred to those two songs, in order to show that there is a wider public out there (misinformed perhaps, I won't argue there) that applies the term "folk" to a much wider bag than that defined by the 1954 definition. I will not argue the rights and wrongs of it, there's no point. As Howard Jones said, the genie is out of the bottle, no use arguing the toss no matter how upsetting it may be. You/we may wish dearly that they would use some other term than "folk" for the purpose, but the majority rules. We may call it "newspeak" but that changes nothing.

The time to shore up the 1954 definition was in the 60s. If it proved impossible to do then, by what measure can one hope to achieve it 50 years later?