  We demonstrate that the O(a) taste mixing exhibited in standard textbook
presentations of staggered quarks is an artifact of the particular definition
of the flavor fields in those presentations, and has nothing to do with the
underlying precision of staggered-quark actions, despite continuing comments to
the contrary in the current literature. To illustrate this point we introduce a
new coordinate-space definition of the flavor fields that suppresses the O(a)
term by two additional powers of a. In fact there are no errors at all from
this mechanism. The only source of taste mixing comes from the exchange of
highly-virtual gluons and enters in O(a^2). We review the idiosyncrasies of
Symanzik improvement for naive/staggerd-quark actions, and show how these
results follow from that program.
