Interestingly, Christy Moore was on Libby Purves' talk show on radio 4 this morning. And he used the word "traditional" to describe one sort of song knocing around on the folk scene, as opposed to ewan McColl's newly-composed songs. In fact, he used the owrd traditional in exactly the same sense as me, Jim Carroll, Malcolm Douglas, or any one of a number of contributors to this thread. And it seemd to fit in to the conversation quite naturally in the studio, and I'm sure people understood what he went.
He didn't feel the need to say"Of course I shouldn't say 'traditional' really, I should say 'collected or possibly soon to be collected if some latter day Cecil Sharp gets around to it'".
   Christy Moore was quite happy with "traditional" in ordinary converation, and so am I. If I need to qualify the word in some very precise bit of analysis, I can do so.