Folk and Fairy

It's always tempting to read more significance into words than they actually merit. For example: isn't it strange that fairy tale and folk tale mean, essentially, the same thing? It's a semantic fact that seems to say more than just that ordinary folk are only interested in stories of fairies (which is already fairly dismissive); it seems to say that there is some implied equivalence between these modifiers. Fairy = Folk, which is to say, the bulk of ordinary people, taken historically and culturally in the mass, constitute a kind of illusory or fantasy body ...

As if by talking of the fairy tale, we are implicitly denying the reality of the Volk.