The most common errors in Homework #1 were as follows:
1.Incorrectly identifying the given noun phrases
2.Incorrect page Google counts
3.Assuming that noun phrases were correct even though they had a very low page count
Here are the correct noun phrases:
1.Wine and dine
2.Nip and tuck
3.Wait and see
4.Soup and salad
5.Out and about
6.Kiss and make up
7.Inside and out
8.All work and no play
9.Down and out
10.Cloak and dagger
The purpose of this activity was to help you understand how you can use Google as a linguistic corpus to measure how frequently a particular expression is used and thereby get some understanding of its 'correctness'. The more frequently a word, phrase, or expression appears on the Internet, the more 'correct' we can assume it is.
For example, a search for "dagger and cloak" returns about 2,600 pages. But a search for "cloak and dagger" returns almost 700,000 pages. Based on that, we can conclude that "cloak and dagger" is the 'correct' collocation because it is more frequently used.
This technique only works if you use quotation marks in your search. If you don't use quotation marks when searching Google, you will get very high page counts that will be almost exactly the same for both versions of the phrase.
Without quotation marks, there are about 1.61 million pages for cloak and dagger and 1.69 million pages for dagger and cloak. Also, if you had a very low page count, then it is safe to say that you misheard the noun phrase. For example, someone reported 92 pages for "coke and dagger". But since 92 pages is such low number (there are estimated to be more than 8,000,000,000 pages on the Internet) it is safe to say that "coke and dagger" is 'incorrect'.
You can teach this technique to your students, and then the next time they ask you, "Teacher, teacher, which expression is better, 'x' or 'y'?" they'll be able to find out for themselves.