in fits and starts vs scattered

in fits and starts

prep
  • intermittently, jerkily 

scattered

adj
  • Covering three eighths to four eighths of the sky. 

  • Dispersed, spread apart into disunited units. 

  • Affecting 30 percent to 50 percent of a forecast zone. 

  • Seemingly randomly distributed. 

How often have the words in fits and starts and scattered occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )