"compared to all those people who don't even think about what 'folk' means,"

Yes, most people probably don't attempt to precisely dissect and delimit those words they use in everyday language. But how many words in common usage *are* determined or defined by a process of analysis by an intellectual (be it academic or dilettante) elite?

Words are generated by the pragmatism of human need to communicate something mutually experienced. They are then tumbled like pebbles in water, by the flow of that same ongoing human communication which shapes and sometimes changes them unrecognisably. And yet the collectively *understood* meaning of the word, remains somehow, albeit in a different shape. Thus many words become multi-varianced, subtly nuanced, loaded with a plethora of ragged and unruly associations. These things are understood and accepted, as part and parcel of our everyday ordinary human intercourse. They tend only to become subject to intense scrutiny, when used in the context of critical analysis within drama or poetry, or err court cases.

Of course think tanks create new terms to describe particular notions which have been arrived at, *via* analysis, but they don't tend to try to 'pin down' and clip the wings of terms that are already in popular usage.

Words like 'folk' are like err wild flowers or something, they don't want to behave according to the terms of nice tidy middle England lawns. So why attempt to make them? Just create a nice shiny genetically modified word, one of those sterile F1 hybrids in Latin, that does exactly what it say's on the packet?