Chrysti The Wordsmith: Fair to Middlin'

Greetings This is Christie the wordsmith. When someone asks you how you are doing or feeling on any given day your response might vary from Couldn't be better to life stinks somewhere in the center of these extremes lies the standard reply. Fair to middling meaning you're reasonably well or so so the midline in fair to Midland is simply the word middling with that G dropped an older adjective dating to the 14 hundreds and not much use these days. Middling originally meant of average size or quality English politician and author Edmund Burke in 1759 mentioned quote the middling performance of a vulgar artist. Other authors from the 16th through the 1800s right of middling Christians middling painters and middling students by the sixteen hundreds in Britain the adjective became a part of a grading sequence for various commodities such as wool rye cotton beer and even pins. A typical labeling sequence ranged from

fine to good to fair middling ordinary and poor with middling of course about the center of the grading spectrum. Meanwhile in the US prices were established for fair to middling grades of cotton and by the 1860s the reference was so common in the American cotton trade that the phrase gained traction in our everyday language. Some early examples are found in works by Mark Twain and Louisa May Alcott. I'm Christie the wordsmith Christie the wordsmith a sponsored by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Zoot enterprises a high tech firm in Bozeman Montana offering challenging careers and innovative solutions for the financial services industry. Zoot web dot com.