Fair to middlin'

World Wide Words has a good piece on the origin of the term/phrase "fair to middlin". Here's a few tidbits:

"...from the Century Dictionary of 1889: "Fair to middling, moderately good: a term designating a specific grade of quality in the market". The term middling turns out to have been used as far back as the previous century for an intermediate grade of various kinds of goods, both in the US and in Britain—there are references to a middling grade of flour or meal, pins, cotton, and other commodities...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)...The reference was so well known in the cotton trade that it seems to have eventually escaped into the wider language."