I'm not quite sure what you are saying here Phil, though your post does flag up one point that I've subjugated in my arguments above for the sake of clarity (though I've expounded on it at length elsewhere) - and I suspect this is also what Jim's referring to in your rather out-of-context quote.

This is that there are at least two interpretations of the word 'traditional' too. So it's not cut and dried!

The dichotomy is not as wide as that between the two main meanings of the word 'folk' but it does throw up its own set of problems and confusions.

One group of people use the T word specifically to mean the 54 definition. I tend to this camp as can be seen above, and I opt to use a capital T, or 'THE Tradition' when I'm referring to this meaning to try to help with clarification. I think there's some consensus within this group that because the Trad process was largely killed off by the advent of 20th century technology, and all that went with it, 'Trad' today mainly refers to a specific repertoire, which is now largely a closed book (even though we may dispute the contents at times)!

The other group use the word traditional in a more general way. They'd include all the above, but fell that the '54 folk process' did not stop with the advent of recording technology, because that it is the community process which defines the tradition - not the oral-only element. This group therefore allow quite a few contemporary songs to be called traditional, as long as they've been taken up by a community, and/or are associated with some traditional activity. This, of course, is one of the ways that the 54 definition was eroded in the first place (it wasn't just artists jumping on a bandwagon)

To give an example: Happy Birthday is not trad to group one, but it is to group two. And that goes for Fiddlers Green as well.

Anyway - does this all matter? Not much, as long as people respect the other guy's viewpoint, don't mud-sling, and attribute sources correctly (and, ideally, habitually).

Tom