One of the most useful commands in the terminal is apropos(1). It prints out summaries of all man(1) pages related to a given keyword. However, an annoying interaction between certain improperly formatted man pages and the makewhatis(8) command may cause entire pages to be written out by apropos, which can make it very difficult to read. apropos serial produces an example of the glitch, which arose years ago in FreeBSD and which OS/X has inherited. However, since the apropos command is a shell script, there is a very simple workaround.
You can either make the change in place, in /usr/bin/apropos, or you can place a copy of the original somewhere earlier in your path and edit the copy. The modification is placed at the very end of the script, and involves inserting the command cut -c1-80 | into the pipeline, immediately before the $PAGER invocation. Here is the resulting line:
( printf -- "$line2"; echo "$line"; cat ) | cut -c1-80 | $PAGER
What the modification does is to truncate all characters to the right of column 80. The change will also truncate summary lines that are valid but long -- if you think more data should be written out, change the 80 to whatever you prefer.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2005011721032867