Fair to Middling

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Emma Lewis Thomas.

Hi, Emma Lewis. Welcome to the program.

Well, thank you.

What can we do for you today?

I wanted to know if you could help me understand a phrase that I grew up with, but that always surprises people when I’m not in East Tennessee or in the Kentucky Mountains.

I was born in West Virginia, but my mother was from Tennessee.

And my grandfather used to always say when anyone asked him, how are you, I’m fair to Midland.

And I never knew what it meant because he would always smile and he was always in very good humor.

And other people in the family didn’t use that phrase as much.

And when I became an adult and I traveled widely all around the world, and any time I used that phrase, people would look at me as if I were crazy.

The thing about it is that my grandfather was always very cheerful, and he was never sad, except when my grandmother passed away.

That was the only time I saw him sad.

So I’m wondering if you can tell me the origin of this phrase, fair to midland.

Okay.

So fair to midland, what does that mean to you, Martha?

Is this something in your experience?

Yeah, I’ve heard it.

I’ve heard it, and it goes back to the 19th century and gradations of goods, particularly cotton, when people were talking about different qualities of cotton.

Oh, so you’d bring the bales in, they’d be graded by the wholesaler, and then he would give you money for them, and he’d sell them up the food chain to the textile manufacturers, right?

Right, right.

And there were lots and lots of categories for that, running from fine and then down to fair, middling, ordinary.

And there were lots of different ways to classify them.

But if you’re fair to middling, you’re pretty good.

But they’re not exactly the same, right?

One of the arguments that I see in some of the language books is that fair and middling are the same, so it’s redundant, or it’s a pleonasm.

Do you find that to be true?

I don’t know about that.

I’ve seen all kinds of, I mean, I’m looking at something from the International Library of Technology in 1906 that has all these different gradations, like fair, barely fair, strict, middling fair, full, middling fair, midland, barely midland, fair, good midland, barely good midland, midland, fully midland, midland, barely midland, strict low midland.

You know, I think that there were lots of different categories there.

So he, so he, so Emma Lewis’s grandfather had a term borrowed from the old agricultural south.

Yeah.

He was part of the old agricultural south.

Oh, was he?

Because the family had lived on the same farms.

The first deeds we had were 1770, but they’d been there a long time.

Wow.

So he grew up on a farm, and they did raise cotton.

They raised a lot more other things, but he became a lawyer.

And I interpreted fair as better than midland.

So I thought, okay, fair is good, and then midland is a little step below, but that may be wrong.

No, I think that sounds right to me.

I mean, I’ve seen lots of different interpretations of that.

But I think basically if you pull back from all those really specific little things like strict middling fare and all that, that, yeah.

He means basically fine.

Yeah.

I’m somewhere.

Yeah, I’m fine.

I’m not too bad, not too good.

I’m pretty good.

I’m pretty good, right?

Yeah.

Well, how do we do, Emma Lewis?

Well, wonderful, and I do appreciate it.

Thank you for calling.

You have a good rest of your week, all right?

Same.

Thanks a lot.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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