I took a trip to Knott’s Berry Farm with my teens and hung around the Ghost Town blacksmith shop like some kind of history geek.
The shop was operating, so we saw a demonstration, and heard a spiel, during which I learned the origins of two colloquial expressions.
“Too many irons in the fire” comes from the fact that blacksmiths used to put a piece of iron in their fire to cool it down quickly. So too many irons in the fire will render your fire useless.
“Beat the daylights out of” — in the photo at right, two anvils are pictured. The standard one on the left looks like a Wright or a Hay Budden. The one on the other side of the water barrel is called a “cone anvil.” It was used to make perfectly circular rings. The standard anvil’s horn makes an oval shape, so once a ring was pounded to approximate size, the blacksmith would transfer it to the cone anvil to form it into a perfect circle. They’d beat the ring down on the cone until no daylight was showing, thus beating the daylights out of it.