Without wishing to comment on anyone's typing skills or their behaviour in this forum, I do find some interest in the responses to questions that appear to seek comment on 'definitions' concerning "folk" and "traditional". I've seen several Mudcat threads on such topic and I've seen precious little in them that wasn't aired in debates around the Australian scene 30 years ago.

But I think the context of the debater has a lot of influence on what they accept as 'given' and thus how they construct their participation in the debate. To declare my bias, I am as many generations Australian as you can be without having Aboriginal ancestry (although, 'It's a wise man who knows his own father') and am thus firmly based in a culture dominated by (relatively) recent immigrants. The US and Canada seem to be very similar contexts.

By contrast, in most parts of what might once have been called the British Isles, the current dominant cultural context can be argued to go back a millenium or so. give or take some wrecked Armadas, the end of colonialism in the Caribbean and Pakistan, and participation in the EEC or whatever it's now called. Such depth of dominance of 'local tradition' would be expected to affect residents' views about tradition and change in ways that would be different to those of us described by 'the home country' as 'ex-colonials'.

I'm sure I'm not the first to argue the influence of such different contexts on debate and I doubt I'll be the last. But the positions claimed by debaters at Mudcat seem, to me, to illustrate the point over and over again. Just like most academic discourse.

Cheers, Rowan