I hate to see people being unfairly treated so I'll say this yet again.

Those of us who are over 50 would do well to understand that two, repeat two, whole generations of innocent babes have now grown to band-making age with a clear and universal understanding that this sort of music IS now legitimately called folk by most people who use the English language.

Why?

Because they (since upwards of forty years) they, and their parents and grandparents saw it called so in newspapers and magazines, on the radio and television, on the shelves of record shops, and latterly in the genre idents of websites.

(And 21st has provided incontrovertible proof of this at 15 Nov 10 - 02:56 PM)

It is perfectly reasonable for those of us who have a different, older, definition for this word to explain our understanding, but it is NOT reasonable or fair for us to complain that these younger artists are merely band-waggon-jumping, gate-crashing, party-pooping, selling-out, selling-in - whatever hyphenated word combination you prefer.

We do not own the F word. We can make a case for our claim, of course -and so we should, but we if we act as though that claim is proven we will only come across as insular, divisive, patrician and pedantic.

And even if we are happy to be those things we should understand that the only people who have any right to police the definition of words are lawyers (but only in court) and academics (but only in peer reviewed papers).

Web forums fall into neither of these categories.

This band has every right to term itself folk by dint of common usage, and fRoots and Songlines (and anyone else here) has every right to disagree.

And these two clauses are not mutually contradictory.

Tom