Did "fair to middling" originate with cotton?

[Michael Quinion]

> A while back there was an ads-l discussion on "fair to middling,"
> with attribution of the expression to the grades of cotton: good,
> middling, fair, poor.

I'm sure, from checking nineteenth-century citation material, that
there is an explicit link between the phrase and grades of cotton.
See my piece at

  <http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-fai4.htm>.


--
Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
<editor at worldwidewords.org>
<http://www.worldwidewords.org/>