Or we could be more precise and acknowledge there are several related features in the realm of "functional" and a language may have some but not all of them, and not make it into a fan club battle.
Same goes for OO, which has something like 9 well-known defining features.
I don't think my comment was making anything into a "fan club battle". I was specifically advocating the kind of precision you describe, because I think calling any language with higher-order functions a "functional programming language" results in very muddy waters.
The scenario I described wasn't hypothetical. When a colleague asked our whole office "what's functional programming?" I listened while someone told him that it was just map, filter, and fold. He'd used these in JavaScript already, and was prepared to accept that as an answer. I didn't think that was sufficient, so chimed in and offered some alternative features from other languages that I think are as important as higher order functions, mostly related to minimizing mutable state with managed references and persistent data structures. I think he appreciated my contribution, but I honestly don't know for sure. Maybe it just created more questions.
Same goes for OO, which has something like 9 well-known defining features.