Fair to Middling, Like Decent Livestock

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Eden Braun. I’m from Havertown, Pennsylvania.

Havertown, outside of Philly?

Outside of Philadelphia, right on the main line.

Gotcha. Welcome to the show, Eden. What can we do for you?

So I had a question. My mother, Joyce Brock, used to use an expression, fair to Midland.

And I’ve often wondered about that. It goes something like, how are you doing?

And my mom would say, fair to Midland. So I guess my question is, where’s Midland?

What does it mean to be fair to Midland?

Is that good or bad or so-so?

Was she from the Philadelphia area originally?

No.

So my mom, born and raised in kind of the Illinois area and then met my father and then started the family out on the West Coast in Oregon.

Gotcha.

Was she from Southern Illinois?

I think it’s south of Chicago.

Oh, south of Chicago.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Yep.

All right.

Oh, fair to Midland, Martha.

Yeah, and Eden, I’m wondering, do you have any idea how she might have spelled that last word?

Funny you should ask.

So my husband, Jim, and I debate, is it mid-land or are my ears poor and is it mid-ling?

Well, yeah, your ears are just fine because people say this both ways.

And it’s so interesting to me that this is a question that comes up again and again and again.

People want to know, why does fair to Midland mean, you know, pretty good?

You might say, hey, how are you doing? Fair to middling? And it goes back to the 15th century in Scotland.

The term middling, M-I-D-D-L-I-N-G, meant average or acceptable, you know, not too great, not too terrible, just right in the middle, middling.

And over time, this term middling has just come to mean exactly that.

And there was an old system of grading agricultural products, you know, you might describe them as fine or fair or middling, and we’re talking about rice or cotton or livestock.

There were different ways of talking about the quality of those items.

And so people would use the term fair to middling to refer to those qualities.

And, you know, what’s also interesting is the Midland part, M-I-D-L-A-N-D, Midland being a place in West Texas, has gotten adopted by a lot of people just kind of jokingly in Texas, you know, talking about fair to Midland, meaning something that’s also kind of, you know, so-so, average.

So either of those expressions is correct.

And it’s pretty darn widespread, isn’t it, Grant?

Yeah, I’m surprised to hear you say that the Midland version, the place name version is correct.

Because the fair to Midland is far more common by like 10 to 1 and is the source.

Centuries of use of that before the place name Midland even starts to be used even jokingly in the expression.

Yeah, well, I was going to say people do use it jokingly in Texas.

And I think there was a band named Fair to Midland.

Oh, interesting.

But Eden, I want to reiterate here that what we’re talking about, like you can open newspapers from the 1800s, and there’ll be long lists of goods for sale, usually raw materials, with fair to Midland as one of the options for grading it.

So people would know what they were going to buy when they went down to the auction house or went down to whatever place it was where they traded money for merchandise.

Oh, that’s fascinating. My mom would love that.

Thank you so much for your time, Eden. We really appreciate it.

Call us again sometime, and thanks for sharing your stories about your mom.

Can’t wait to listen to all the shows.

Bye.

Yay.

Take care.

All right.

Bye-bye.

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