Size of Span when smoothing with the Smooth() function

I'm a bit confused about using the smooth() function and setting the span. The docs seem to say that the span is a fraction of data to span over when using loess. I'm using rloess, but it seems the larger the number in the span, the less smooth the data is. Shouldn't it be the reverse, or am I just confused? I expected to be the case when that when span is near 1 I would get flatter data, whereas when it's near 0 I would get more variable data.