[tim333]

You only get defenestrate in quite pretentious literary essays. I'm English and only came across it recently. I think the availability of Google has made that sort of stuff more common writers can use obscure words and rather than have 90% of their readers not understand, now they can google it. English has a vast stock of words like that that some writer probably made up a centuries ago - there's a lot of old literature out there.

[smitty1e]

English's jumbo vocabulary makes it great for doggerel, because so many ideas can be phrased with multiple rhymes and syllable counts.

[ghaff]

And punny and other wordplay headlines. For example, I could absolutely see, if there were a politician named Fenwick who was fired, a headline writer doming up with: Fenwick defenestrated.

[brigandish]

It's not an uncommon word, even in speech. I did a quick check and the Times, Telegraph and Guardian all have plenty of examples of its use, too, across different sections of the paper. Even the Daily Mirror had 4 entries.

The Sun, however, came up blank.