Via Mr. Verb comes this citation of a joke about strong verbs in The Onion:

Adrian, MI - After a week of precipitation, Kelly Knoke has started using "snew" as the past tense of "snow," just to mix it up a little.

You probably know about the visualization trick for learning new words: create a mnemonic device linking the sound of the word to its meaning. For example, to learn hirsute, you might picture a woman standing in a business suit. The suit has hairs poking out of it all over. You then tell yourself, "Her suit is hairy."

Arrrh, me hearies! Today be Talk Like A Pirate Day, on which day I be wantin' to answer a question that gentlemen o' fortune all o'er the briny blue ha' been askin' theyselves: what be the part of speech of avast?

An interesting phenomenon of language variation is lexical reversal, where a term that normally points in a specific temporal direction is flipped. Hence people will occasionally use ancestor, which points backwards in time, where descendant, which points forward, would be standard.

Writing in the New York Times, David Cohen meditates lyrically upon the differences between British and American English. Cohen uses these differences, especially individual words--loo vs. bathroom, bonnet vs. hood, car park vs. parking lot, etc., as a token of a larger cultural divide. He quotes Victor Katz, noting

There is the illusion that we speak the same language, but we really don't.

This morning my son was watching Sesame Street and I heard Grover ask rhetorically, "Anyone know what 'agglutination' means?" I immediately had Aran practice saying the word, but he's a little young to lecture on morphological structure, so I left it at that.

While driving in to work this morning, I head the reporter on NPR talking about a sense of "palatable relief" on Wall Street due to the bail out of AIG. After I finished snickering, for which elitism I will soon, doubtlessly, be punished by the law of prescriptive retaliation, I googled the phrase. It's not very common (only 100 g-hits as opposed to 8080 for 'palpable relief'), and a few are just accidental collocations crossing phrase boundaries, but clearly this is not unattested.

This article from the BBC magazine talks about the decline of the hyphen. The new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has apparently removed the hyphens from some 16,000 words, reflecting a decline in how people use them.