Eggcorn Forum

While writing an Email today I was momentarily flustered when trying to decide between “fast forward to…” and “flash forward to…” thinking that one was an eggcorn of the other. I concluded that both were perfectly good idioms in their own right—with hundreds of millions of Google hits each. However, I did wonder whether “flash forward” subliminally lead to the usage of “fast forward” in this context.

Last edited by jorkel (2009-03-28 05:55:19)

I’ll have to agree with the above quoted version. Flash forward was used correctly therefore nil on the eggcorn. I’ll check the google search next time :)

Seems to me that “flash forward” is, in most contexts, an eggcorn. “Fast forward” is a fairly tight idiom used in restricted contexts. Any alteration is suspicious. Especially, as David says, given the parallel “flashback.”

Inserting an /l/, as we do with “fast/flash,” is a common door into the eggcornome. A liquid/lateral phoneme doesn’t require a lot of speech effort to add/subtract. We’ve seen this in the eggcorns lamblast, cueless, bomblastic, filibluster, glibberish, bobbling (for apples), jailwalking, and doltage.

I expect we are all agreed that flash forward is not a widespread, well-established idiom like flashback is. But it is beyond dispute (I think) that the nominal flashback , the verb phrase pattern “Verb back ” and probably the specific example of that pattern flash back (as in “her thoughts flashed back to the time that …”) and of course the words flash , back and forward , with the latter two being opposites as to direction, are all well-established. Given that, I have no problem with supposing that the phrase flash forward (as in “her thoughts flashed forward to the time when …”) could easily be coined by multiple speakers or writers and understood perfectly well by multiple hearers or readers; it may in fact be established for a number of them, and nominal and adjectival versions (“a flash-forward button”) could be derived from it easily enough as well. With changing technologies, fast-forwarding in the old sense is rarely necessary and often undesirable; jumping to the beginning of a later scene or song (the sort of usage you described above) is more accurately described as flashing forward. In none of thse usages would flash forward be an eggcorn.
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To be a full-fledged (fully hatched?) eggcorn the perps would have to think that all along they had been hearing everybody else say “flash forward” all along when in fact they had been saying “fast forward”. It may indeed be the case for some, but it may be an independent formation (as described above) for others. I am in the latter group; I can use both phrases; I believe I have done so in the past and meant different things by them, not confusing one for the other.