The problem here might just be that the asterisks are confusing:


ii11 : help

oo11 = initial help
       ************

       Welcome to Macaulay2


       Try entering '2+2' at your next input prompt, which begins with i.  The two output prompts begin with o.  The first one, with the equal sign, '=',
       gives the value computed from your input, and the second one, with the colon, ':', tells what type of thing the value is.


       Type one of these commands to get started reading the documentation:
         * copyright                         -- the copyright
         * help "Macaulay2"                  -- top node of the documentation.
         * help "reading the documentation"  -- 
         * help "getting started"            -- 
         * help "a first Macaulay2 session"  -- 
         * help x                            -- display the documentation for x
         * ? f                               -- display brief documentation for a function f
         * printWidth = 80                   -- set print width to 80 characters
         * viewHelp                          -- view documentation in a browser
         * viewHelp x                        -- view documentation on x in browser
       To read the documentation in info form, in case you happen to be running Macaulay2 in a terminal window, replace "help" by "infoHelp" in any of the
       commands above.

ii14 :          * copyright                         -- the copyright
stdio:10:10:(3): error: expected key to have only single interior spaces:"Macaulay2, version 1.4.0.1
Copyright 2012 Daniel R. Grayson and Michael E. Stillman,
  licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 or 3.
For Macaulay2 packages, see their source code for licensing terms.
Compiled with the following libraries:
  GC 7.3 alpha 1, by H. Boehm and Alan J. Demers
  Singular-Factory 3.1.4, by G.-M. Greuel et al.
  Singular-Libfac 3.1.3, by M. Messollen
  frobby 0.8.2, by B. H. Roune
  pari 2.5.0, the PARI Group, Bordeaux
  NTL 5.5.2, by V. Shoup
  MPIR 2.4.0, by Free Software Foundation et al.
  MPFR 3.0.1, by Free Software Foundation
  BLAS and LAPACK 3.0, by J. Dongarra et al."
