hit upon

It was at the university that the two first hit upon the idea of studying smelly shoes.

I somehow doubt he would have hit upon the main explanations: that international politics are more complicated than New York real-estate deals—and that he’s been misjudging who Putin really is all along.

When Reubens first hit upon the childlike, toy-obsessed Pee-wee character at the Groundlings, Newman said, “He knew he had something he could draw on so easily, because he was a 10-year-old boy at heart.”

It was this and the expansive brooding sound of Songs of a Lost World which saw Vella and Smith hit upon the design for the record, which features a stone statue head lying on its side.

‘Sherman’s March’: Ross McElwee’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner was an unlikely sleeper hit upon its release in 1986; in that year of “Top Gun,” audiences didn’t seem likely to flock to a nearly-three-hour documentary meditation on romantic failure, as voiced by a soft-spoken Southerner retracing the path of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman in the final months of the Civil War.