I wrote in Folk Review about 1972, in a column of mine on this topic, as many one or two of my "Taking the Mike" back-page columns were: "It's a free country; call them all 'folk' if you like. Except that this impairs communication, which is not altogether a good thing. If every article of household furniture was called a chair, we wouldn't know where to park our arses."

This formulation much caught Peter Bellamy's fancy: I must have heard him quote it a couple of dozen times.

It seems to me there are those on here who are well-meaningly defending & augmenting such confusion of nomenclature, in the interests of some putative "freedom of expression" or such. Just be careful, as they say, what you wish for.

≈M≈