Well, my college guitar guy was a classical zealot, and he really believed his classical methods were better for every idiom and style, even if he really didn't understand or appreciate them. I was young and impressionable, and it took me a while to go back to chasing the noises that messed with my head. And I liked some classical--especially the old lute tunes that are really antique folk, I think. If you try to play the sounds you like, at least you are trying to share a real feeling for something, you don't sound like a student, turning in an exercise just for a grade, while worrying ...Is giving a rat's-ass going to be on the test? And that's the worst criticism, to me, the saddest, most un-musical, dis-artistry of all. Not even genuinely TRYING to share any real feeling about anything--the opposite of folk, imho.

People composed for orchestras, and wanted to have a clear idea of what sounds they were composing for and with, in symbiosis. If you aren't playing that stuff, what do those strictures and standards and that clear idea of a particular sound have to do with you? Not too much. You can make good art out of anything, any sight or sound. Why chase fake art because it has associations of Prestige. One of the earliest American aesthetics in architecture began with making fun of Americans living in fake European Chateaus. Houses that nothing to do with them, or them with their houses. Play with your baby.

Your luthier was probably trying to impress you because you are, probably, unbeknownst to yourself, an unmitigated babe, and a smart, spooky fiddle-babe on top of it. That messes some people up in the head. I'm not making it up, women get lots of odd condescension from music tech guys, meant to impress them, but which pisses them off. I've seen lots of threads on music sites about women being especially dissed in music stores and repair shops. I remember the first time I read about it I thought--so that's what that funky atmosphere is! Guy funk!

   Being too particular about "growing" a language as messed up and dirty as english is silly. That train left a while ago. "Diss" is so much better, novel, useful, un-obvious, and evocative an invention than "parenting" it disses "diss" to compare "diss" and dat.