@regehr the most haunting element of this is that in your average group of programmers or grad students you will never, never be allowed to forget this.

One of our devs had a commit message involving "transistions" rather than "transitions" and no-one could resist using "transistions" in his presence for the next 5 years whenever NFA/DFA transitions came up. Which was *often*, since we were a automata-theory-based startup.