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Ask HN: Where does the phrase "Fast" originate from?

7 points by jskherman ↗ HN
I've been hearing this term A LOT in companies' marketing, in various YouTube videos, and sometimes used in memes. Where is it actually from? Search engines, Bing, nor ChatGPT don't give a proper answer.

8 comments

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PaulHoule
Fast is better than slow. I'm not going to take any guff about "fast fashion" or "slow food". My #1 problem w/ McDonald's is that it fails to deliver on the "fast" part of the brand promise.
Jensson
Fast food maybe, you get what you want immediately instead of having to wait like you do at a normal restaurant.

So FastX would mean that you want to be McDonalds of X.

jskherman
Update: Did the title not save properly? Sorry about the ambiguous title.

What I meant to ask was: "Where does the phrase 'Blazingly Fast' come from?"

Jtsummers
Superlatives and some other words get stripped from titles. Always double check your submission title after submission and edit them back in if appropriate (as in this case). This has been a thing for years, it is not new.

I’d resubmit if you want responses at this point or email (contact link at bottom of page) dang to edit it now.

throwaway154
Motor racing perhaps. As in, the wheels are on fire.

I believe I've heard it in relation to the internet since broadband rollout. But who knows, perhaps that's just past experience fallacy.

To see whether or not, try the Wayback Machine. Here's a search for this phrase: https://web.archive.org/web/*/blazingly%20fast

nickm12
The phrase "blazingly fast" is tightly associated with Apple in my mind. Some searching finds that it was part of the marketing of the Power Mac G4 in 1999. No idea if it was used earlier, but The Forbes article even puts the phrase in quotes, perhaps indicating that it was uncommon at the time.

https://www.forbes.com/1999/08/31/mu4.html

weare138
All I know is it's pretty old. I'm from GenX and I remember hearing it when I was a kid.