day [OE] The ancient word day has a Germanic root which may have meant ‘to burn’, through association with the heat of the sun. The working day [M17th] is the day you refer to if you call it a day [L19th], ‘decide to stop doing something’. In the mid 19th century, when working people had fewer holidays, the expression was to call it half a day. If something unusual is all in a day’s work, it is taken in your stride, as part of your normal routine. Jonathan Swift’s Polite Conversations, which mocked the clichés of 18th-century society, suggest that the phrase was in circulation even then. Daylight dawned in the early Middle Ages (LME dawn itself is closely related to ‘day’). It was always associated with seeing, and in the mid 18th century daylights appeared as a term for the eyes. This is not the meaning in to beat the living daylights out of someone, where ‘daylights’ are the vital organs, such as the heart, lungs, and liver (see light). The word ‘living’ is a later addition to the phrase, from the late 19th century. Days of wine and roses are times of pleasure, which will inevitably pass. The phrase comes from a line in a poem by the 19th-century poet Ernest Dowson: ‘They are not long, the days of wine and roses’.