Fair to Middling

Posted by Maddog on September 18, 2002

I read the previous threads and didn't see what I was looking for. Being from the South, this is the story I was told and wanted to confirm.

.Which market the Century Dictionary was referring to is made plain by the nineteenth-century American trade journals that I've consulted. Fair and middling were terms in the cotton business for specific grades - the sequence ran from the best quality (fine), through good, fair, middling and ordinary to the least good (inferior), with a number of intermediates, one being middling fair .