I used to use the phrase "fair to middling" when someone asked me how I was doing today.
Then a farrier (?)- that is, someone who shoes horses, told me that was a blacksmithing term: fair being dull red and too cold to work, middling being yellowish and too soft, so that if something was between fair and midddling it was the right temperature to work. Since either way I usually wasn't quite that hot, I stopped using the phrase. Sounds plausible, though I have no way of knowing. Also a phrase I found interesting was "not worth a tinker's dam". The last word is properly spelled. A TIN-ker being a person who made his livelihood by re- tinning pots and pans the tin lining had worn off of. If a pan had a hole in it, he would take clay and mold the clay into a rope shaped piece, them press it around the hole in the pan to form a dam into which the tin could be poured and solidify, thus patching up the pan so it could be made to serve a while longer. Naturally afterwards the dam wasn't worth a ----! Now I'm wondering if the word itinerant came from the roving tinkers with their wagon/repair shop/homes. Wonder if they were Rom or Romany ( gypsies ) originally? There were suggestions that the gypsies of Europe were a people who came somehow from India way back when. And then Koestler thought that the my ancestors the Magyar (Hungarians)came from mid-russia, down to the area near where Armenia was, hooked up with the Kabar tribe ( khyber? ) and converted to Judaism about 500 AD, moved up away from the Turks to what's now Hungary, and were converted by Prince Stephen (whom the Pope gave crown jewels to for converting) about 1000 AD. Hmm, now will have to check out Magyar weaponry. Do know they had something called a Hungarian axe, about 4' long, shaped like a sparth axe.
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Russ S