I don’t know why the phrase ‘the cold light of day’ popped into my mind – maybe because I have been up very early recently and I just thought, yes indeed, at this time of year it is definitely the cold light of day. There is a particular quality of light in the early morning – and I know the saying isn’t ‘the light of a cold day’ but when the sky is grey and the sun is not revealing itself the light does have a cold feel to it.
I was trying to find the origin of the phrase or when it was first used, but I can’t. I found some definitions:
- if you think about something in the cold light of day, you think about it clearly and calmly, without the emotions you had at the time it happened and you often feel sorry or ashamed about it:
- the objective realities of a situation.
and I found that there were several films with it as a title:
- The Cold Light of Day, 2012 – an American espionage action thriller
- The Cold Light of Day, 1996 – a remake of Es geschah am hellichten Tag a Swiss-German-Spanish suspense film; it actually translates as something like ‘It happened in broad daylight’!
- Cold Light of Day, 1989 – a British film
There were novels and other books, but not as many as I had imagined with it as a title:
- Cold Light of Day (Cold Justice Book 3) – Toni Anderson
- Cold Light of Day – Emma Page
- I can now see you in the cold light of day: Short Stories Volume 7 – Tony Hyland
- Cold Light of Day – Paul Cave
- In the Cold Light of Day – Pauline Barclay
- Judge Dredd Year One book 2: The Cold Light of Day Michael Carroll
- In the Cold Light of Day: Reflections of a baseball tragic and the 9 life lessons I learnt from the game. – Carlton Briggs
- Obsidian Dawn: From the Cold Light of Day – Jordan P.T. Mock
I shall keep trying to find an origin or first use of the phrase, but I don’t think I will use it – it is a bit of a cliché, isn’t it?
Lois Elsden 