Somebody above mentioned "pedantry?" Okay, here's some pedantry for you!

Okay, Ron, so citing the dictionary was not necessarily the best defense for my position. However, as I'm sure you are aware, especially within recent decades dictionaries tend to reflect popular usage of words, often with little regard to the niceties of such things as the formal definition of "definition." A good definition consists of two parts: genus and differentia. Genus specifies a broad category and differentia differentiates a particular thing from all other members of that genus.

The use of the genus-differentia definition is by no means restricted to science. Rather, it is the natural thing to do if you are to explain the meaning of a particular word to someone. With this, the "classical" type of definition (Definitio fit per genus proximum et differentiam specificam.), one uses the copula (is, are) after the word being defined (just as if you were using an equals sign in a mathematical equation) and then go on to explain the word by using the appropriate generic term plus those characteristics specific to the thing you are describing which consecutively narrow down the meaning until the word in question can no longer be confused with anything else. [Emphasis mine – DF].

A few comments I posted on a thread some time ago are, I believe, relevant here:

As far as anyone knows, the first person to ever use the term "folk song" was Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), a German philosopher and collector of volkslieder (folk songs). He was referring to songs of the rural peasant class. In this modern world, which has become more urbanized and which we like to think of as "classless" despite the mind-boggling spread between the richest and the poorest, it makes people uncomfortable to think that there might still be such a thing as a peasant class. When many poor people live in the cities and try to keep body and soul together by scrubbing toilets and flipping burgers (preferably not the same person and not in that order), we don't like to acknowledge that we may still have what might be considered a peasant class. It embarrasses people. It embarrasses governments. Thus volk has slowly morphed into "just plain folks," which we like to apply to everybody, including people with annual incomes that exceed the GNP of a medium-sized country. And the term "folk singer" got pried loose from traditional singers of traditional songs and got stuck on any singer who sings fairly simple, strophic songs to the accompaniment of a portable musical instrument, especially if they write the songs themselves and like to call themselves "folk singers." And especially if they've recorded a CD and music stores opt to put it in the "folk music" bin.

Folk Festival.

Don Firth