In the manual, it says that with the game set on medium difficulty you'll get only the normal sword and flaming sword icons during combos, but i'm also getting the disabled sword icon that is supposed to show up only on easy mode.

Did a patch change this or was the manual always wrong?

you can read the information in your questbook
all tooltips are saved there and ready to be read :)

Bumping this because I'm seeing the same thing and no one has answered.

I am also wondering if there was a change in a patch or a misprint in the manual?

This made me wonder if I had accidently started the game on easy. I think it feels like medium difficulty and I have died a few times. I don't see a way to find out what difficulty you are playing on. Is there somewhere I can check the difficulty to be sure?

Manual's wrong. The icons show up unless you play on Hard.

QUOTED FOR TRUTH

something kind of cool--the sword itself changes colors to indicate timing on 'hard.'

Thanks guys. This is good to know.

I am guessing that not showing the icon must be a design decision that they changed their mind about. It seems like it would probably be really frustrating if you had to just take a blind guess on when it was OK to swing the sword.