It is also not uncommon to have code where the various elements do not live up to the claims made in their identifiers. If a programming language is expressive

It is also not uncommon to have code where the various elements do not live up to the claims made in their identifiers. If a programming language is expressive enough to create self-documenting programs, it is expressive enough to imply things that are not true. The point is that if you are not going to trust the words a programmer puts in documentation, then you can't trust the meaning of any words they choose to use in identifiers, either - but if you don't trust the words they use for identifiers, then the code is not self-documenting in any meaningful way. The observation that documentation can be bad does not justify the claim that good code never needs documenting.