beat the living daylights out of, to

To punish severely, to thrash. This cliché is in effect a colorful elaboration of to beat someone up, an American locution dating from about 1900. The word daylights was a nineteenth- century American colloquialism for one’s vital organs. “That’ll shake the daylights out of us,” wrote Emerson Bennett (Mike Fink, 1852). Another writer referred to “pulling out” a mule’s daylights by beating it, and mystery writers of the early twentieth century sometimes had their characters “shoot the daylights” out of someone. Earlier British versions are to beat black and blue (Shakespeare), beat to a jelly (Smollett), and the equally hyper- bolic beat to a pulp. Another American synonym is to beat the tar out of, which unlike the other fairly graphic equivalents is more puzzling, but has been used since about 1800.