My example wasn't an assumption, but a matter of linguistic history. I have no opinion as to whether such things are good or bad; the concept is meaningless, as would be a debate on whether or not evolution is good or bad. I grew up in South London, speaking both Standard English and a south-of-the-river form of Cockney, so I don't think I can be accused of partisanship in this case! Here in Yorkshire, people often think I'm "posh" because I use the long "a" and talk like somebody off the radio.

I took the fact/opinion business as relating to the second part of my post. I can't pretend to know what is going on in other people's minds, but it's certainly the case that there are a good few English songs in the DT which use archaic or dialectal forms and which are marked as Scottish; and that a lot of past threads here contain comments from people who have assumed incorrectly that a song is Scottish, citing the presence of certain words in it as the reason for their belief (The Lyke Wake Dirge is an example). Some of these comments have subsequently been enshrined in the DT, so that part is certainly fact. I can't, of course, be certain that all such mis-attributions have been made on linguistic grounds (that's why I said "apparently"), but there is often no other obvious explanation.

I made a point of distinguishing between fact and opinion in the Three Fishers thread, which I assume Ian had in mind, because I had named a source for my initial comments (quoted there without my original formatting, which impaired their meaning); these were not my personal opinion but a matter of record; I followed them with a value-judgement and a speculation; these were purely my own, or I would have cited an authority.

Phew!