middling

Example Sentences

• "The football team is never the worst or best in its league; its position is always middling."
• "[…] I cannot think it unreaſonable, […] to imagin the ſame natural cauſes may ſometimes act in t'other extreme likewiſe, and model Humane Bodies from a peculiar Energy in the ſeminal Principles, or a more perfect and through concoction in the Stomach, and other Viſcera, whence may proceed a peculiar and extraordinary nutritive faculty in the humours, for the furthering augmentation; or ſtill from ſome other more latent Spring, or ſecret Influence, to ariſe to ſuch a growth as fully to equal twice the heighth of (what we may then properly call) a middling ſtature, taking the word in the moſt ſtrict ſenſe."
• "Had it [De le Maniere d'écrire l'Histoire (Concerning the Manner of Writing History, 1783) by Gabriel Bonnot de Mably] appeared ſooner, and been peruſed by with docility by ſome of our minor adventurers in this walk of literature, it might have had a good effect, by ſhewing them, that it is not ſo eaſy a matter as they think to write hiſtory, though the moſt middling genius may fling facts, dawb characters, and copy tales and truths promiſcuouſly."
• "All this is undoubtedly compatible with mediocrity, like every other profession; one can also be a middling poet, a middling orator, a middling author; but this done with genius is sublime."
• "Yet there he [Samuel Richardson] is, plump, prosaic, the most middling of middling men, and so domestically fussy that even his gift of weeping hardly guarantees that he will be a major figure."
• "Rather, [Thomas] Holcroft uses his experiences as fooder while claiming the status of an "author" just as more middling writers did."