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April 2, 2011 8:51 am
If you're fair to middling (or with the g dropped: fair to middlin’), you're doing just fine. A native of the Tennessee mountains wonders about the origin of this phrase her good-humored grandfather used. As it turns out, fair to middling was one of the many gradations a farmer would hear in the 19th Century when they'd bring in their crop — usually cotton — to be priced and purchased. A lowercase version, fair to midland, is considered a folk etymology based on a misapprehension that it refers to Midland, Texas, or a miscorrection of the colloquial pronunciation fair to middlin’. This is part of a complete episode.