following the rules of English text in manual pages was followed reasonably consistently in later versions of Unix, and in all the years i've worked with any of the systems, i cannot recall an instance where i was stumped, and certainly was never so perplexed that i couldn't invoke the command or write the code to call the function. (the content of manual pages in some other Unix-like systems is quite another matter, but i refer only to Unix and its relatives.)
as with the `obfuscated X' contests (where X is a variable, but obviously includes the window system), no doubt one can construct a manual page that provokes a mixture of humour and head-scratching, but that's art or artifice not documentation.
