This is interesting. It's not just words, but events as well. It seems our minds are quite adept at finding things that are unordinary. If you asked someone living in a city environment "How many people did you see walking today?", no one would be able to answer. However, if you asked "How many people did you see riding unicycles today?", you would likely get a pretty definite response.

I've spent a good amount of time learning memory techniques to retain information that is largely abstract/arbitrary (learning Japanese/Chinese characters for example). The key to these techniques is to take something abstract and figure out how it encode it in concrete images/stories (a mental "bookkeeping" system like Roman Rooms is helpful as well). However, the strength of the encoding relies on how memorable your images are. In essence, you are creating a mapping between the brain's ability to work with images and abstract knowledge. Generally, the more crazy, ridiculous or absurd these image/stories are, the more memorable they will be, and thus the easier it will be to remember whatever you are trying to remember.

A task that normally seems extremely difficult (say, memorizing the Periodic Table, or the order of a deck of cards, or even just remembering people's names!), becomes almost trivial if you map the knowledge into something the brain is easier to understand.