Things change so quickly these days that backlashes to Next Big Thing occur before most of us even know about the Thing. I’m going to call them frontlashes.

Here’s one: Hypermilers fear a backlash as wannabies latch on to their most dangerous techniques such as drafting.

Huh?

Hypermilers are, as I learned today, people who try to squeeze every mile out of a gallon of gas. There are the sensible tricks: driving slower; coming off stop lights without laying rubber; and keeping your engine fit as a fiddle. Then there’s rolling through stop signs, driving way too slow, and drafting like Kyle Busch.

The classic hypermilers are worried that idiots picking up on their tactics (at sites like leanmpg.com, hypermiling.com and hypermilers.com) will take the dangerous ones to extreme, giving all hypermilers a bad name. “Now that the general public keeps hearing this falsehood that hypermiling is all about drafting, a lot of idiots are going to start trying it — and we’re going to get the blame.” Well, sure, now that we’ve exposed the frontlash, the backlash should go into high gear. I’m going to look for some of these idiots this afternoon when I hit the road, in fact.

I suspect the rapidly changing economy in America will set up all kinds of frontlashes (I don’t expect the term to catch on, however).

Another example: Hypermiling is to me today what stripping was a few weeks back. We learned of a backlash among local real estate agents to stripping, which we then learned is rampant in our town. People who are peeved that they’re losing their homes to foreclosure are taking everything with them, leaving the houses largely unsaleable. The backlash gained steam last week when a guy in Pennsylvania went to jail for stripping a $1.2 million home of everything AND the kitchen sink.