Errrmm ... I haven't actually tried to interpret Sharp in any way .... I was more interested in the sentence before the Sharp quote. More than one of the collectors actually saw their job as to collect the tunes and the words as an integral whole ... on the same lines as John Broadwood had adopted in his work of 1847. Some others, such as Vaughan Williams initially focused their attention on the tunes ... although even he later saw the error of his ways, and tried to retrace his steps to glean the words which should have been married to the tunes he had earlier collected. They were not all clone copies of Sharp!! Can't develop this, as I have to rush to catch a train!!