Meaning of in the cold light of day | Babel Free

Definitions

1. Viewed calmly and dispassionately after allowing emotions to cool or after having sobered up.
   figuratively
2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see in, the, cold, light, of, day; during the day; in daylight.

Equivalents

Examples

“In the cold light of day, I felt I had overreacted.”

“In my over-wrought state of the night before, it had seemed reasonable enough; but here, in the cold light of day, it seemed preposterous.”

“To the dreamer, a dream can seem at the time eerily indistinguishable from everyday consciousness yet, in retrospect, upon waking, so self-evidently different. The fragmented narrative, the improbability of much of what happens – flying, for example, or the transmogrification of one individual suddenly into another, and so on – seem ludicrous, even embarrassing, in the cold light of day.”

“In the cold light of day, we're a flame in the wind / Not the fire that we've begun.”

“And above the crowd of living figures rise colossal forms of armed warriors, and peaceful poets, and sceptred monarchs; these glowing crimson; those standing calm and pale in the cold light of day.”

“However subtle the social pecking order may have been, the outsider entering the famous town with high expectations saw it in the cold light of day shrink into a philistine backwoods dump.”

“Heather drove her mother to the Bloodshot Eyeball so they could survey the damage in the cold light of day.”

CEFR level