kick someone's ass vs knock the living daylights out of

kick someone's ass

verb
  • To actually kick someone in the buttocks. 

  • To clobber someone; to beat someone severely. 

knock the living daylights out of

verb
  • To beat or strike someone. 

  • To greatly excel against (someone or something). 

  • To thoroughly and decisively defeat someone in a physical fight, especially by knocking out that person. 

How often have the words kick someone's ass and knock the living daylights out of occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )