Whether we agree with it or not is irrelevent as just inventing other definitions will only cloud the issue.

I think it's probably better to get rid of the definitions rather than making new ones; neither the Horse Definition or the 1954 Definition tell us anything about the music. A musicologist might however - for more see below.

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The kind of people who expect sex on the first date, and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence for this - are those who have met in internet chat rooms or other ways across the ether.

People of both sexes have been happily having sex on first dates long before the internet, that they continue to do so, in hotel rooms, is a matter of pragmatics & personal discretion.

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No, Sweeney. "Folk" differs not in form but in derivation, as the 1954 definition states.

Yes, Richard. Because all music is thus derived. Show me one which isn't.

"Community" is an elastic term and a community may be long or short lived, large or small, dependent on particular links or general, and physical or today virtual, and nothing about that undermines the 1954 definition.

If that's the case we have no argument & there's no difference between the horse definition and the 1954 Definition. So - folk music is tautologous. Where does that get us? Far better we focus on what does make it different, and we won't find that in the 1954 Definition.

There is nothing condescending or patronising as far as I can see in referring to a community as a community - and if there were, so what, it would still be a community.

I'm thinking of the romanticism (and by implication patronisation) that assumes there can be such a thing as a community uninfluenced by popular & art music. The whole thing is couched in a functionalist rhetoric which has no place in today's thinking. How can music remain unchanged? Change is the very nature of the thing.

You seek to build upon an error therefore when you proceed to assert that we have failed to define "folk music".

The essence of music can be found in the material itself, the idioms rather than their derivation. It is a musicological issue, if it is an issue at all. After all, most of us can spot a Folk Song, or a song aspiring to be a Folk Song, when we hear it - just as most of us can tell if a person is speaking French or German even if we can't understand what they're actually saying.

An immediate culture cannot be a heritage. A heritage is what those before you did, and from which you spring.

In which case it's a bit vague to be of any use, even though I'm dealing with various consequences of the past all the the time. When I bake bread, am I doing so as act of heritage or necessity? I think heritage, like folk, is maybe missing the point rather. Both are unhelpful constructs and both are the reserve of a minority of enthusiasts.

PS: Another horse definition. You can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink.

Or as Stan Laurel said: You can take a horse to water but a pencil must be lead. But that's a proverb surely? There's a few more here:

http://www.ultimatehorsesite.com/info/quotes_horseproverbs.html