"Stop getting touchy"
Just because you go through life believing everybody is getting at you, it doesn't mean that they're not.
"Can't see the word 'borrowed' in there Jim,"
Covered elsewhere but here goes again, "explored and expanded the form" which is a reference to how it was performed, not what it is - style, not definition.
Not even Steeleye's best friends could claim that they performed'folk songs' in a traditional style, yet their origins remained 'folk'.
"man in the street"
The "man in the street" seldom, if ever refers to folk music as anything at all - one of our great failings.
When he does, it is usually on the basis of misinformation generated by a disinterested media which has also failed to gain public interest for folk music in any shape or form - one of my favourite T.V. programmes is Q.I., which spends an hour at a time bursting such bubbles of inaccuracy.
The nearest the general public en-mass came to folk song is probably via Sharp's Folk Songs For Schools, and later, snippets doled out by such performers as Hall and MacGregor on popular early evening news discussion programmes (names escape me) - both of these were far closer to the real thing than anything else that captured the public interest in any depth.
Those of us involved tend not to go to the man in the street for our information and the meaningless black-hole that the term seems to have plunged into means it will probably be a long time before we get an opportunity (in the U.K. at least.
I wholeheartedly agree with your last sentence.
Jim Carroll