Lore is an Old English word that means something like body of knowledge or the knowledge that is taught, which means it has been in the English lexicon for nigh on a thousand years.
Folklore, on the other hand, is much more recent. It was famously coined in 1846 by William Thoms, a British writer who was particularly interested in antiquities, including myths, fairy tales, and other sorts of oral traditions.
Folklore is related to lore, as you might expect, because folklore is exactly that: the lore of the folk. In other words, folklore is the body of knowledge that constitutes the myths, old wives' tales, legends, and other cultural foundations of a group of people.
Folklore can be contrasted with herb lore, for instance, which is the body of knowledge concerning the means of cultivating and using plants for medicinal purposes.
An interesting bunch of examples, and correctly grouped.
However, the three groups are not monophyletic. Briefly,
Group A is an example of what linguists call a "rule conspiracy", where a number of independently motivated processes "conspire" to produce a similar surface structure. Georgia Green discussed them in her paper [Green, Georgia M. (1970) 'How Abstract is Surface Structure?' CLS 6, 270-281].
What's come to be called the 'Green Conspiracy' includes such structures as
- I shot him dead.
- I buried him alive.
- I found him alive.
- I need him dead.
et cetera, with very different meanings.
The point, if any, is that there is a limited number of surface structures that English prefers, and there are many more different ways to get from meaning to one of them. I.e, these structures do not represent a single kind of meaning, but rather several. They are all, of course, regular (in much the ways suggested by the OP), but which rule gets used is arbitrary and idiomatic.
EDIT: a little more about Green's paper, which seems to be difficult to find.
This is from a paper by Goldsmith and Huck commenting on the theories involved.
Green (1970), noting that a variety of different semantic structures could be associated with the same surface syntactic construction, argued that there must be a limited set of syntactic “target structures” into which the transformational rules map their
representations. The sentences She shot him dead and They buried him alive, she argued, both share the same superficial syntactic structure, but crucially differ semantically as to whether the adjective indicates a pre-existing state or a result. As she pointed out, “natural language syntax is free to utilize mechanisms by which a large and diverse set of logical and semantic relations are somehow squeezed into a small number of surface structures” (Green 1970:277). In that paper, she referred to such mechanisms as “conspiracies.”
Group B is a conflation of several varieties of Raising and Equi,
with different kinds of tensed and untensed complement clauses.
Group C consists of several examples of the rule of to be-Deletion
(p.9 in the Transformation List).
Best Answer
Use contentment. The sense of content as a synonym for contentment is no longer in use, except as a component of set phrases like [my] heart's content.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines content (n.) as
and finally (with a different pronunciation)
The noun content is not often used to indicate the state of being happy.
It is, however, used as an adjective or transitive verb with that meaning, e.g. I am content/he contented himself with one piece of cake.