"dim <someone's> daylights", 1800

[Joel S. Berson]

At 8/22/2011 10:02 PM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:
>Did it ever change to headlights? I might still get inclined to knock
>the living daylights out of somebody.
>DanG

But would you be inclined to knock the living *headlights* out of
somebody?  Daylights are part of human anatomy (or something), and
can be called "living"; headlights are part of mechanical anatomy,
and can be literally dimmed, via a switch.

"I'll dim your headlights" sounds like something sayable today, that
I might even have heard sometime; "dim your daylights" not.

("Knock daylight" exists in only two quotations in the OED:

1881    Punch 17 Sept. 124/1   Ready at the call of duty to frame a
new programme or knock daylight into an old one.   [I don't know
whether this means "amend to be useful" or "punch holes in".]

1921    Everybody's Mag. Oct. 145/1   'The old son-of-a-gun has got
to the Dutchman and is knocking daylight out of him.' He would go
down and get a ring-side view.  [This seems rather concrete.]

I don't find "knock headlight(s)", and nor did I find "dim
daylight(s)/headlight(s).)

Joel

>On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 9:06 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>
> >
> > 350 -- [A Miss Dunstan tumbles against a Miss Slammerkin] who,
> > stepping back, asked her, in an angry tone, if she had a mind to be
> > running her rigs, telling her, at the same time, that she would _"dim
> > her daylights."_
> > ["running her rigs" = rig, n.5, P. 1.a. ="To make a fool or mockery
> > of; to ridicule", from 1735--; or P. 2. = "to behave recklessly; to
> > run riot", from 1750--.]
> > ["dim <someone's> daylights" not in OED?  When did this expression
> > arise? (Google Books has only this one source with "her" -- and none
> > with "his"!)  When did it mutate to "headlights"? (Also not in OED,
> > and too many of the GBooks hits are literal for me to follow that up.)]
>
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