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Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
cotton-picking

as a deprecatory term first recorded in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, but a similar noun meaning "contemptible person" dates to around 1919, perhaps with racist overtones that have faded over the years. Before mechanization, cotton picking was the most difficult labor on a cotton plantation.\n\nI drove out to a number of the farms near Denison and found many very young white children working all day in the hot sun picking and dragging sacks of cotton. In one field the labor corps consisted of one woman and six children, one of them 5 years, one 6 years, one 7 years, one 9 years, and two about 11. The father was plowing. The 5 and 6 year olds worked all day as did the rest. The 7-year-old said he picked 50 pounds a day and the 9 year old 75 pounds. (A good picker averages several hundred a day.) School begins late on account of the cotton picking, but the children nearly all prefer school to the picking. Picking hours are long, hot, and deadly monotonous. While the very young children seem to enjoy it, very soon their distaste for it grows into all-absorbing hatred for all work.

["Field Notes of Lewis W. Hine, Child-Labor Conditions in Texas," report to U.S. Congressional Commission on Industrial Relations, 1916]

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Wiktionary
cotton-picking

a. (context US idiomatic colloquial English) An intensifier, like "darn", used for emphasis or to signify that something is of little value. n. The harvesting of cotton

Usage examples of "cotton-picking".

Which is gold-plated bizarre, because while I'm hands-on-the-controls, the acceleration couch prodding my back and my suit turning into a sauna because I'm all for conserving its resources as long as I have a perfectly functional shuttlecraft providing me with life support, I'm also spinning apart, decohering, as if fingers and toes and eyes and kidneys and guts all suddenly decided that the arrangement that's suited them just fine for the last fifty-odd years simply will not do for another cotton-picking moment.

The orders of the Holy Diet are to net up every cotton-picking scrap of life, Sacred or nonsacred, from this little green mudball—which is what we are to them—and take us back to their universe later on until all of our star systems are sucked dry.