August 8, 2023 - You are walking down the sidewalk downtown and you meet a friend – “How’s it going, John?” you ask. “Fair to middling,” he responds. I know you have heard that phrase for a long time, but do you know for sure what it actually means? Or, from where did it originate?
I have always understood it to mean “about average” – you’ve been better, and you’ve been worse. I did a little research on this phrase and offer the following:
Some “experts” say that it began as a weather report in England. It was originally worded, “fair to the midlands.” With the midlands being the center part of England.
Other “experts” contend that it comes from the various grades of cotton. Under the old method of grading cotton, which was phased out in the 1970s, cotton was given a grade according to its quality. Each bale of cotton was sampled in three places, and the samples were graded by trained classers. These samples ranged (listed from best to worst) from “fine” to “good” to “fair,” to “middling” to “ordinary.” With some intermediate classes later added. So, using the grades listed above, a “fair to middling” was okay, but not particularly good. It was probably acceptable, but not was truly desired. These terms still exist in use in the cotton trade, although computer grading of samples and numerical grades have largely displaced them.
Another clue surfaced. In the early 1900s. An elderly lady got on the city bus in Houston, Texas every day. When the bus driver asked how she was doing, her answer was “I have the fare to Midland so I’m doing okay.” He then asked her every morning “fair to Midland?,” and she would nod “yes.”
It is probable that the phrase is American, most probably dating from the nineteenth century. There is a clue in the Century Dictionary of 1889, “Fair to middling: Moderately good; a term designating a specific grade of quality in the market.” The term middling turns out to have been used as far back as the previous century for an intermediate grade of various kinds of goods, both in the United Stated and Britain. There are references to a “middling” grade of flour, meal, pins, cotton, and other commodities.
Early samples of literary works like Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, and Artemus Ward, suggest that it became common on the east coast of the United States from the 1860s on. The first example in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Artemus Ward in his Travels of 1865 when he wrote, “The men are fair to middling.”
It would seem to me that this phrase, “fair to middling,” was so well known in the cotton trade that is seems to have eventually escaped into the wider language. I think it safe for us today to understand it to mean “from average to better.” So, whenever someone tells you that they are “fair to middling” you know exactly what they mean, even if they don’t.
