#6 WORD SERIES: “Livi’n Daylights”

                                    Okay, two words.

"Good woman! I don't use to be so treated. If the lady says such another word to me, d--n me, I will darken her daylights."

            That line is from the 1752 novel, Amelia, by British humorist Henry Fielding.

We don’t know, that is, I don’t, when the expression “Daylights” for eyes reached American shores, but we know that by 1819 the witty and raucous 17-year-old Harvard student, Augustus Peirce put the phrase to work in his ode to a Harvard college food fight, his poem, “The Rebelliad; Or, Terrible Transactions at the Seat of the Muses.” He included:

The people used to turn about,

And knock the rulers’ daylights out.

And from page 20:

Go on, dear Goody! and recite the direful mishaps of the fight. Alas! how many on that eve, O’er suppers lost, were doom’d to grieve! What daylights pummell’d black and blue! What noddles smear’d with goreless hue!”

On it goes with blood, bricks, and bowls flying between young intellectual elites in this Harvard College food fight. “Goody,” (a contraction of “good-wife), was one of the college bedmakers.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the British aristocrat, Francis Grose, who was “too fat to ride a horse, too poor to own a carriage.” He was a polymath, prolific not only in producing children but producing worthy sketches. He collated antiquities, lived rough, and haunted English backstreets to collect around 9000 bawdy words for his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785). Grose gave us this definition:

"Plump his peepers, or daylights; give him a blow in the eyes."   

By the 19th century, the link between 'eyes' and 'daylights' had weakened. Brawny Americans punched the phrase up. Boxers beat the “liv’n daylights” out of opponents. The term came to mean threats great enough to ruin a person, eyes and all. Not to death did this phrase lead, only to complete disablement.

Then the James Bond series brought the Phrase into the 20th century with the film, “The Living Daylights.” I didn’t see it, but I can only imagine there was plenty “eyes and all” brought to ruin.

~  ~  ~

I’m serious here, you can stop reading. It’s fun to learn about familiar but uninvestigated words or phrases, but where I’m going next is not fun.

My maternal grandfather was genius. He was a southern boy, all polite with his soft words, but he was a mean man. He called his wife Darl’n. There are often things appealing about a mean man. My grandfather was a brilliant machinist, honest in business dealings, owned an irresistibly fine laugh, and a candy drawer beside his overstuffed chair where he sat to listen to the radio news and detective stories. Sometimes it is simply too hard to rightly identify wickedness.

I hope you can follow this: my mother, his only child, learned early never to be alone with him. After my mother married at age eighteen, my grandmother meant to leave her husband. She would have, had she not found herself pregnant. In the first year of my parent’s marriage, my mother’s sister was born. My own brother was born shortly thereafter. Two years later, I was born, and two weeks after my birth, my grandmother gave birth to a son. My grandfather hated that boy.

One hot Arizona day, to teach his nine-year-old son a lesson, he used a baseball bat to beat the liv’n daylights out of his little kid’s puppy. It took time for the puppy to die. The mean man preferred a razor strop to beat the liv’n daylights out of his boy.

“Well, that’s over,” said my gentle grandmother when after fifty years of marriage her husband died.

“Good riddance,” said my mother.

“The day that Son of a Bitch died, the world became a better place,” said my brilliant and extraordinarily kind uncle when I called him yesterday.

“Liv’n daylights,” as a noun appeals to me. Eyes open, alive to the world when the sun is shining.

If I can get away with calling this phrase an adverbial noun when it is used to complement a brutal verb, it breaks my heart.