Of course, King Cnut didn't want the tide to go back. What he was actually doing was demonstrating to his flattering courtiers the limitations of even a king's power, by making them get their feet wet -- an exemplar of rightness rather than of vanity. My late first wife Valerie put it rather well in one of her books: she wrote, "History has given Canute the wrong footnote."

So I agree with Steve's analogy. We are, alas, not going to stop them saying "folk" so promiscuously about things that we know are nothing of the sort, much as we would love to do.

≈M≈