The phrase "a leap back" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a return to a previous state or condition, often implying a regression or a step backward in progress.
Example: "After several years of innovation, the recent policy changes feel like a leap back to outdated practices."
Alternatives: "a step backward" or "a regression".
The monarch's right to appoint the prime minister may look to some churls like a leap back into the past, but why cast around for an alternative authority when this "obvious choice" is ready to hand?
For compared with central Oslo, which is dominated by staid 19th-century neo-Classical buildings that give it an air of solid respectability, downtown Bergen, dotted with wooden structures a century or so older, felt like a leap back to a more colorful, adventurous time.
Taking a leap back in time, there's The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional by Agustín Fuentes, professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame.
The majority of this is expected to come from video games, but while the hardware guys can clearly see a future, will the games themselves actually be a leap back to the past when it comes to the player experience?
Doing ecological restoration in New York requires not just a return to some vestigial state, but a huge leap back to a time and place that many people say has been irretrievably lost under the tumult of history.
Experience clearly paid off more than usual in 2010, with much of the movement near the top of the rankings coming from veterans like Jürgen Melzer, the sympathetic Austrian left-hander, who soared to No. 11 after a career spent outside the top 25, or Mardy Fish, an American who made a big leap back into the top 20 after dropping lots of weight.
The known history of human origins took a vaulting leap back in time: French scientists announced that a seven-million-year-old skull found in the central African country of Chad is the oldest member of the human family yet discovered, by as much as a million years.
Home Alone (1990) was a big leap back in target demographic, but it employed a familiar Hughes template: the kid who outfoxes his (in this case, particularly dim and negligent) parents, and anyone else who tries to get one over on him (Joe Pesci's bumbling burglar).
"No one who's followed their situation in the last six months could be surprised by this, and I only hope the layoffs will help them make a strong leap back," said Mayor William A. Johnson Jr. of Rochester.
And then it ends with a great leap back to simplicity.
Eight years later, we have taken a giant leap back as we descend in the mire of racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and every other phobia that has plagued this election cycle.
