Well said Ron.

The phrase 'I just scored a wicked mouse for my mac' no longer means 'I just folded a badly-behaved rodent into the pocket of my raincoat.' But it's insuting to neither Jerry nor Jobs. It's merely some old words that have acquired new meanings.

Language is a river of evolution - and the power in the most expressive of them all, English, lies entirely in the way it has eddied, ebbed, tumbled, rambled, chuckled and prattled over the centuries. And long my that process continue - for to dam it would be to damn it. Utterly.

The world Folk can no longer be equated with the word Traditional (as it was, briefly, by the International Folk Music Council in 1954). To try to fight a rearguard action (comme 'le rosbif') half a century later is, shall we merely say, unhelpful.

It really serves us right. We have been horribly lazy in this field. Making do with just 'folk' 'traditional' and sometimes 'source' (plus a few others), to describe a miriad of facinating and crucially different concepts.

What we need to do now is find some NEW words, which, for a while (only), will better describe what we mean, than these vague behemoths. And when their meaning shifts again, as it surely will in a few years time, what fun we'll have finding some new expressions.

Tom