diff --git a/Doc/using/cmdline.rst b/Doc/using/cmdline.rst
index 0d2924de758..4b2793ff7df 100644
--- a/Doc/using/cmdline.rst
+++ b/Doc/using/cmdline.rst
@@ -262,7 +262,7 @@ Miscellaneous options
 
    This is intended to provide protection against a denial-of-service caused by
    carefully-chosen inputs that exploit the worst case performance of a dict
-   insertion, O(n^2) complexity.  See
+   construction, O(n^2) complexity.  See
    http://www.ocert.org/advisories/ocert-2011-003.html for details.
 
    Changing hash values affects the order in which keys are retrieved from a
diff --git a/Misc/python.man b/Misc/python.man
index 91787cdd0f1..96c99649b3e 100644
--- a/Misc/python.man
+++ b/Misc/python.man
@@ -162,7 +162,7 @@ not predictable between repeated invocations of Python.
 .IP
 This is intended to provide protection against a denial of service
 caused by carefully-chosen inputs that exploit the worst case performance
-of a dict insertion, O(n^2) complexity.  See
+of a dict construction, O(n^2) complexity.  See
 http://www.ocert.org/advisories/ocert-2011-003.html
 for details.
 .TP
diff --git a/Modules/main.c b/Modules/main.c
index 9c73900d708..135ef6ee228 100644
--- a/Modules/main.c
+++ b/Modules/main.c
@@ -106,9 +106,9 @@ PYTHONCASEOK : ignore case in 'import' statements (Windows).\n\
 PYTHONIOENCODING: Encoding[:errors] used for stdin/stdout/stderr.\n\
 ";
 static char *usage_6 = "\
-PYTHONHASHSEED: if this variable is set to ``random``, the effect is the same \n\
-   as specifying the :option:`-R` option: a random value is used to seed the\n\
-   hashes of str, bytes and datetime objects.  It can also be set to an integer\n\
+PYTHONHASHSEED: if this variable is set to 'random', the effect is the same\n\
+   as specifying the -R option: a random value is used to seed the hashes of\n\
+   str, bytes and datetime objects.  It can also be set to an integer\n\
    in the range [0,4294967295] to get hash values with a predictable seed.\n\
 ";