That's OK. I thought I was doing something fairly straightforward/standard, especially in the definition of 'term', but when I ran in to problems and asked an office mate for help, and I quickly sketched my def. of term he got hung up on that before I even moved to the real problem.

Which again makes me feel like I haven't quite latched on to the right way to describe things, but at least for now I'm not going to worry about it over the weekend any more.