background vs throwback

background

noun
  • One's social heritage, or previous life; what one did in the past. 

  • Information relevant to the current situation about past events; history. 

  • The image or color over which a computer's desktop items are shown (e.g. icons or application windows). 

  • A part of the picture that depicts scenery to the rear or behind the main subject; context. 

  • A less important feature of scenery (as opposed to foreground). 

  • A type of activity on a computer that is not normally visible to the user. 

verb
  • To put in a position that is not prominent. 

  • To gather and provide background information (on). 

adj
  • Less important or less noticeable in a scene or system. 

throwback

noun
  • A person similar to an ancestor, or something new similar to what already existed. 

  • A reversion to an earlier stage of development. 

  • An atavism. 

  • An organism that has characteristics of a more primitive form. 

  • Coordinate terms: nowhere income, throwout 

  • A person considered to be primitive, uncivilized and mentally deficient. 

  • A person or thing that evokes memories. 

  • A practice to avoid untaxed nowhere income by instead taxing such income in the originating state for a given transaction. 

How often have the words background and throwback occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )