You have a good point Jim, but Soldier Boy's is equally valid. There are two main schools of thought here.

1) Those like Jim who mean something quite specific by the term 'The Tradition', an oral process which could only exist in a wold without mini discs, mp3s, myspace etc so which has of course died out _as a process_ even though the material is still around (and still changing). Jim - and probably MusTrad, EFDSS and others - need a word which ONLY describes this oral process, and the material which came down to us through it, and then became, to a certain extent, preserved in aspic and/or otherwise diverted by (some) collectors.

2) Soldier Boy and others need a term that describes the evolution of music by any means, including Jim's, but also many others including myspace and ipods, 70's album tracks, The English Book of Penguin Folk Songs, jotting down a tune in a session etc.

As long as these two camps are trying to use the same word for these two very different things there will be trouble - the worst of which being a blurring of the LEGAL definition of 'tradtitional' (and here again the law is inadequate also), which results in authors being denied roylties, and, equally wronly, arrangers acquiring copyright of work they did not create and do not morally own.

I'm suggesting that Camp 1) should take a deep breath and start using the word 'Collected' rather than 'Traditional' to decribe 'their' material, and also - when needing to describe the oral process - to qualify 'traditional' with 'oral,' 'rural,' 'seafaring' etc. as a matter of habit.

Meanwhile Camp 2) should also drop the word 'trad' and use perhaps 'folk' as that word has, most would agree, now broadened sufficiently in definition to describe what they mean adequately. So this on-going process becomes the 'folk' process - which, of course, includes ALL the previous traditional definitions and the rest.

And I've already suggested how the legal definitions might be shaped up for use when publishing.