I am using 17.30.0.1014 so it is possible that this bug has already been fixed.

Each menu item has a little bit of text that shows up in the status bar on left side to explain what the menu item does. In the View Menu, the View As (Highlighting File Type) list of file types shows text snippits but maybe should not. For example in my configuration when Javascript menu item is highlighted, the status bar text says "File change detection". Each language entry has a different snippit and none of them relate to the file types.

Yes, this was a bug which is fixed already.

In the released hotfix versions 18.20.0.1020 and 18.20.0.1027 nothing is displayed in the prompt area on status bar when a syntax highlighting language item is highlighted in View - View as (Highlighting File Type) which seems to be a quick solution after a user reported this issue by email to IDM support or somebody of IDM has detected it.

In UE v19.00 and all later versions the prompt area on left side of the status bar shows View as Language x [language name] with x being a number in range 1 for most top language in menu to n for last language in menu which is equal the number of languages. language name is the name of the syntax highlighting language as defined in the wordfile and as displayed in menu, too.

The bug with displaying a random help text for a language menu item was introduced according to my tests with archived versions of UltraEdit with v15.00, the first version supporting a (nearly) unlimited number of languages stored in a wordfile directory instead of up to 20 languages stored in a single wordfile as UltraEdit prior v15.00 only supported.