Ammon Shea gets my respect for reading the Oxford English Dictionary and then writing a book with that title. In my own project I read through only the words marked as obscure, archaic, or one of the other labels like that, and picked out the ones I liked. His recent article about absurd entries is fun, and the comments show something that I also experienced: no matter how hard you try to pick out something funny for being esoteric, there will be someone to tell you they learned about it in third grade. I do agree with some of the comments about disghibelline though; the definition "To distinguish, as a Guelph from a Ghibelline" shows that there is nothing special about the meaning, and even if you haven't heard of Guelphs and Ghibellines, it kind of explains why anyone used such a fancy word just to mean "distinguish." (One can presume that particular distinction was very common and/or important at some time and place, and the word then spread to a broader meaning.)

The discussion also rapidly drags out the old chestnut of map-makers inserting fake roads and rivers to detect copycats. If true, this strikes me as a worse form of copy protection than anything the RIAA or the MPAA can dream up. Worse for the consumer, that is. Can you imagine every time you miss a turn, having to wonder in the back of your mind if the road you meant to take is real?