Every single function is not going to be an idiom. The vast majority aren't. Those are the point. Try not to get caught up on details.
I don't see why you say describing the arguments has nothing to do with "it", whatever "it" is, because in my example the whole point was to describe the arguments, so I would have thought that would have a lot to do with "it". Neither do I see your point about not understanding bit fields, because at no point did I suggest not using them. I just suggested that actually writing out the meaning of a constant is easier to understand that contracting it. Finally,
> Most of this stuff has manuals, you know.
The point was that if you can read the code without pausing to pick up the manual, that's easier for everyone involved. If you're going that way, you could just as well call every function a(), b(), c() and so on, and just document them somewhere else. That would save even more keystrokes.
My point is that as a very experienced programmer, I was at first somewhat put off by the verboseness of Objective-C, but after actually using it for a while, I've come to appreciate the self-documenting nature of the code one ends up writing. It would be a pain to write normally, but combined with autocompletion, it really works very well.