That's pretty funny, I had to do a second take to notice the typo. I wonder if it's because there aren't any modern words that end in -lyn or are close to brooklyn.
Happens all the time when you are type setting, like writing in LaTeX. Its not designed to be your word processor and its easy to think you making minor edits/fixes when you are really quietly destroying everything you had already revised dozens of times.
What’s a good alternative workflow? I’d be quite interested to know as what you said identifies with what I’ve experienced.
I think getting your source file into Github and having it go through peer-review is the best way to avoid these types of issues. Also changing the diff format from 'diff-by-line' to 'diff-by-word' improves readability a lot.