Hi Carl:
Is
\include "english.ly" different from
\language "english"?
It's an old form that predates \language "english". I'm an old dog, so sometimes I forget the new tricks. At any rate, your snippet didn't include \language "english", so I had to fix it.
Part of my residing in the weeds is not being sure where \define command (and its relatives like \defineBarLine) ought to go...while the compilation didn't crash, the bar line construction was ignored in this case
\define always goes at the top level -- outside of any other expressions.
The other change I had to make in order to avoid errors was to replace #f with "" as the third element in the \defineBarLine list. The documentation allows the use of #f, but it threw an error and I changed it to "", which worked. That was a successful guess on my part.
Carl