e.g. “When I ask them what their biggest fear is, they often say they don't like clowns – the adults who scare the living daylights out of people in a nasty way.”
Other examples are:
“Every single game I am on his case that I think he goes in too soft-hearted and today I said to him I would slap the living daylights out of him if I don’t see that aggression and desire.” (A severe, hopefully figurative, slapping is threatened here.)
“Poorly mixing nostalgia and newfangled ‘it's all connected!’ franchise world-building, the stitched-together Spectre will bore the living daylights out of you while threatening to render James Bond a culturally irrelevant relic of the past.” (This review claims that Spectre is an extremely boring film.)
The Living Daylights is also the title of a song by Norwegian band A-ha (one of several of their idiomatic song titles – see THE SWING OF THINGS), which was commissioned in 1987 for the James Bond film with the same title [1].
The phrase appears to originate from the use of “daylight” or “daylights” as a metaphor for eyes, and by extension any vital organ of the body, since the mid 18th century [2].
[1] “A-Ha” In Encyclopedia of Popular Music, edited by Larkin, Colin, Oxford University Press, 2006.
[2] “daylight” In Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms, edited by Ayto, John, Oxford University Press, 2009.
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