SS,
Having somersaulted somewhat clumsily away from your statement that you 'know what you are in for' in a folk club, can I draw the conclusion that, given your definition (sic) you haven't the slightest idea what you would find there (pig-in-a-poke keeps springing to mind). If so, doesn't that take away my right to choose what I would like to hear - especially as I think I know what a folk song is, I have hundreds of friends who think they do, and if any of us are in any doubt - well - there's always 'The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs' to fall back on.
The nonsense of all this is, if it were ever to be taken seriously (and we burn all the books mentioning the word), it would seem that I could go down to the Dog and Duck Folk Club and listen to songs that might be booed off the stage at the Pindar of Wakefield Folk Club.
What I could (or not) expect could depend on the organisers' personal taste, Judgement, knowledge, or lack of any or all of these - or even what he or she had for breakfast that morning.
This is 'singing horse' writ silly - or as Humpty Dumpty was reported to have said:
"When I use a word, it means what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less".
And what ARE we going to do about the related disciplines? Are we going to declare UDI from folklore, folk dance, folk tales, folk customs, folk music?
The term 'folk' did not originate with the IFMC in 1954, but was coined as 'folklore' by William Thoms in 1846 - 160 odd years old and still going strong! It was adopted in relation to song some time around the beginning of the 20th century and incorporated into the 1954 definition because of the common origins shared by all the disciplines I've just mentioned.
As I said earlier in this thread, none of this nonsense makes the slightest difference in the long term.
Folk song is fully documented and will survive long after the clubs have distorted and diluted themselves out of existance and all the hangers-on have moved away to find another peg to hang their musical hats on.
Somebody mentioned the term 'democratic' earlier. Personally I can't think of anything more George Orwellish than to sit back and allow a tiny splinter group to re-write the dictionary to suit their own lack of imagination.
'Tradition and folk different'
No they're not; they are two sides of the same coin - folk referring to the origins of the songs, tradition to the transmission and filtering process that made them what they evolved into - joined at the hip.
'The word 'folk' has pretty much been left for people to use as they please'
Only within the narrow Freemasonry of the folk clubs – and not universally there, but only where personal tastes and interests have made it convenient to have it so. Elsewhere, where it is used, it still retains its meaning - want a list of books, articles, collections of music, dance, folktales, folklore, customs.... which still sit comfortably with the term in its original sense – can't wait for the huge J M Carpenter Folksong Collection to see the light of day.

Jim Carroll