Changes from mschulkind

[frap129]

This PR holds some changes from @mschulkind taken from his fork of layman. This is not a 1-to-1 merge, as I am taking the time to clean up and squash the changes as necessary. For example, all of the typo fixes have been squashed into one commit, all of the typing changes, etc. This branch is living, it will be rebased and force pushed until it's ready to merge.