Side amusing note -- the story brought up in my memory my difficulty in figuring it out in Unix usage years ago. Without anyone to show me or really having any

Side amusing note -- the story brought up in my memory my difficulty in figuring it out in Unix usage years ago. Without anyone to show me or really having any useful manual on what it's purpose was, I kept on trying: "man &" to find out its purpose, usage -- "man" being the tool that I turned to for explaining to myself anything. Little did I know there are commands/characters that operate outside of the manual-explainable set. Funnily, this never got me anywhere.