RichThesaurus
hit like a ton of bricks
vs
knock the stuffing out of
hit like a ton of bricks
verb
To have a sudden and significant impact.
knock the stuffing out of
verb
To cause (someone, a team) to lose energy and confidence.
How often have the words
hit like a ton of bricks
and
knock the stuffing out of
occurred in a corpus of books?
(source:
Google Ngram Viewer
)