Anybody have the poop on this phrase? Most of the times I have heard people use it to describe themselves as being just fair, or just okay:
“How are you?”
“Fair to midland.”
If this is the case, why not just say “fair” and leave it at that? Does adding the name of a city in Michigan to the word “fair” add some special meaning?
‡Sigh‡
I wish the subject line appeared in the preview detail.
It’s “fair to middling,” not midland. (Ughh.)
Middling means fair. So the idea of the phrase is to reinforce the concept of “not great, not horrible.”
Every summer there’s the Midland County Fair. According to my calendar it starts August 12th this year; it usually runs for a week.
As you can, imagine it’s fair to…
:d&r:
Actually, fair used to have a more upbeat connotation than is currently found in U.S. speech. That meaning still carries in the phrases “fair skies” or “fair weather,” but (perhaps influenced by “fair” meaning “neutral” in decision-making or perhaps influenced by the phrase in question), “fair” now implies “adequate” or “not bad.”
Middling, on the other hand, has carried the connotation of mediocre or “not bad” for a few hundred years.
As originally spoken, “fair to middling” (or “fair to middlin’”) meant “doing somewhere between pretty nice and just about getting by”, so it had a “downward slope” to what it implied. As “fair” has lost its positive energy, the phrase is now just a long way of saying “so so.”
Ah so it’s a pronunciation issue, as I assure you I hear people say quite clearly “Fair to midland”.
Now I can get to sleep at night.
A pretty common way to pronounce it is middlin’, which makes it closer to midland. I’ve never heard someone accent it on the second syllable, but you never know.