meaningphrasal-verbs
The title of a section of a book by Robert Nozick is: *How to Back into a State without Really Trying".
I've never come across the word back as a verb, except to back up.
I can't find this phrasal verb in the dictionaries. What is the meaning of to back into?
In my experinece you run into people and trouble:
I ran into Betty at the store today. I haven't seen her since college!
I ran into your co-worker Bob today.
Sorry I'm late; I ran into heavy traffic.
You come across objects:
I was cleaning up the kitchen and came across that phone bill you lost.
I was looking up (something) in the encylopedia and came across this interesting tidbit.
I'm not sure I'd use either when talking about a grammar error in a blog; I'd be more likely to say I found or noticed it. I don't know why that is.
As the comments indicated, "flicked through" appears to be common in British English, although they seem to use "flipped through" almost as often. Here's an Ngram with the "British English (2009)" corpus:
On the other hand, American English doesn't use "flicked through" as much. Here's the graph using the "American English (2009)" corpus:
Beyond that, a writer may alternate between flicking and flipping through pages for some variety. Both words are onomatopoeic and they create slightly different sounds in my mind as I read them.
Best Answer
You can understand "back" as a verb "back up" and add into: Back up into
You might think that sounds strange, but that is correct to understanding it.
First, you might want to find definitions of back, verb. If that doesn't help, you can search for back into. The advantage of the Internet is that you can put quotation marks around just about anything, then search:
define verb "back into"
Here, I saw back into in bold, so, under back, verb, I saw: — back into: to get into inadvertently (well, that's one definition, and comparing it to your title, it seems to work.)
But here it was perfect: to move backwards, or make someone or something move backwards; back into/out of/away from etc. She backed into a doorway to let the crowds pass by.
In addition, it gave me a few more phrasals using back. :)
By the way, that book looks really interesting, and I like National Book Award winners, so you have helped me, too.