Mock reference books go back a ways but the first really great practitioner of the art was newspaperman Ambrose Bierce. Collected under various titles and put out in a few editions, his so-called Devil's Dictionary is the standard for judging the definitional darts of these specialized lexicons. Looking at Bierce's Dictionary now, the tasty parts of the stew boil to the surface: its bile and wit, its misogyny, its digressions (poetry or snippets of dialogue follow many entries), its practiced cynicism. Bierce poked at everything about society that seemed false to him, from organized religion to hypocritical social norms, but...
