"be hit-and-run" (and Google counts)

[Mark Davies]

>> "Hit and ran" is also fairly well attested with 209,000 raw google hits.

Like most Google counts, though, these numbers are really problematic. If you start paging through the hits (100 hits at a time), they end on page 8, or after about 720 hits (as opposed to their initial "guess" of 209,000).

This is the same problem with Google counts that others have mentioned. Google will "guess" 500,000-1,000,000 hits for a multi-word search (since it doesn't really know the frequency of anything beyond single words), but then when you go to actually see them, there's just a tiny fraction of the hits there.

Even with just 700 or so hits, though, it does show that the construction is somewhat more frequent than what would probably be expected.

Mark Davies

============================================
Mark Davies
Professor of (Corpus) Linguistics
Brigham Young University
(phone) 801-422-9168 / (fax) 801-422-0906
Web: davies-linguistics.byu.edu

** Corpus design and use // Linguistic databases **
** Historical linguistics // Language variation **
** English, Spanish, and Portuguese **
============================================

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org